Born in L'vov (Yiddish: Lemberg) in Western Ukraine, Israel Alter studied with notable teachers. He began his career at Vienna's Brigittenauer Tempel-Verein when he was twenty  years  old.  In  1925  he  moved  to Hannover, Germany, where he remained for ten years before leaving during the Nazi era to become cantor of the United Hebrew Congregation in Johannesburg, South Africa. He emigrated to the United States in 1961 and was appointed to the faculty of the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in New York City.1

By the time Israel Alter began teaching at the School of Sacred Music in the early 1960s his vocally active years were as a vanished dream, the voice itself but a passing shadow. Prior to that, the only recordings of Alter's that were available in the United States featured works mostly by Sulzer and Lewandowski, stylistically a world apart from the emotional improvisatory hazzanut in a minor mode that had wide appeal among a guilt-ridden North American Jewry after the senseless destruction of its European counterpart.2
Alter was born within two decades of Sulzer's and Lewandowski's deaths, in their shadow, so to speak. He considered those two 19th-century giants the living proof of Noah's blessing to his sons in Genesis chapter 9: Yaft elohim l'yefet v'-yishkon b'oholei shem ("Let the beauty of Aryan nations dwell in the tents of Semitic peoples").

In pursuit of that goal, Alter extracted thematic inspiration from emotionally-driven prayer - T'fillat ha-regesh - and reshaped it along lines that would prove aesthetically acceptable in the temples of Vienna and Hannover. He delved into the grammatical structure of liturgical poetry and analyzed prayer from a philosophical viewpoint until he could rationalize whatever musical reference he might quote to better bring out the meaning of the words.

If that was not exactly T'fillat ha-seider - intellectually-driven prayer - it should certainly qualify as yet a third category: T'fillat ha-seifer ("literarily-driven prayer"). Alter was a yodei'a seifer, an extremely learned individual from a truly scholarly rabbinic family. Due to his encyclopedic knowledge he inevitably borrowed other people's ideas, often without realizing it. A case in point: Dani'eil ish hamudot ("Your Greatly Beloved Daniel"), a text from the S'lihot section of Yom Kippur Eve, whose published setting originated with Alter's revered teacher, Yehudah Leib Miller of Vienna and later of Haifa and Jerusalem. No one who knew him would ever accuse Israel Alter of willful plagiarism. Yet he sat on a committee that published Miller's composition as part of a posthumous collection in Johannesburg, 1949. Three years later he issued his own reworking of Miller's composition. In fact, the piece had circulated orally, for years. As if to prove its widespread familiarity, in 1958 Sholom Katz recorded a third version using the same musical ideas, without crediting Miller.3

The reverse is true as well. In 1931 Israel Alter - then Chief Cantor of Hannover - embarked on a joint tour of Western European cities with Moshe Koussevitzky, Chief Cantor of Warsaw, in which they officiated alternately at services on Friday night and Shabbat morning. If Koussevitzky davened
Kabbalat Shabbat, Alter did the honors for Ma'ariv; the following morning they would reverse the order for Shaharit and Musaf. Every weekend would culminate in a shared Sunday Evening recital that left critics searching for
superlatives. One reviewer in Rotterdam wrote, "It is difficult to choose between them or to prefer one over the other; each has his own strengths and is in every way infinitely superior to any other cantor now before the European public." Another critic referred to Alter's voice as "the roar of a lion," and to Koussevitzky's as "an eternally bubbling spring."4


Koussevitzky's strength lay in his soaring interpretations of others' musical inspiration, Avraham Moshe Bernstein's Adonai adonai being one of his early triumphs. Alter's forte was in the shaping of hazzanic recitatives according to theological ideas expressed in classical rabbinic prayer texts known as ma'amarei ha"za"l (Sayings by Our Sages, of Blessed Memory). It was a match made in cantorial heaven. Alter's setting of the first Mishnah in chapter three of tractate Avot-Akavya ben mahalal'eil omeir ("Akavya, son of Mahalaleil, said: 'Consider three things and you will avoid sinning'")-became a calling card of his friend and touring partner, Moshe Koussevitzky. So convincingly does it conjure up the world of the East European beit medrash (study hall)
that people rarely associate it with its actual composer: Israel Alter-the great Oberkantor of more westerly Jewish communities in Hannover, Germany and Johannesburg, South Africa.

We know better. We also know that the setting of Sh'ma koleinu ("Hear Our Cry") composed by Alter for a series of complete services for the annual liturgical cycle, commissioned and published by the Cantors Assembly between 1966 and 1971, is the product of his own musical and scholarly imagination. His immensely powerful voice was a force of nature. His creative impulse was best described by researcher and lecturer Akiva Zimmermann, paraphrasing a verse from the Hoshanot section recited on Hoshana Rabbah:    

Alter's musical Torah she-bikhtav ("Written Law") consisted of his undying compositions; it is taught as Torah she-b'al-peh ("Oral Law") every time a hazzan chants a masterful prayer-setting of his, such as Sh'ma koleinu:

1 After Velvel Pasternak & Noah Schall, The Golden Age of Cantors (New York: Tara), 1991: 15; Biographical Sketches with Irene Heskes.

2 Joseph A. Levine, Rise and Be Seated (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson), 2001: 221f.

3  Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur Service Highlights, Cantor Sholom Katz, Choir of Chizuk Amuno Congregation, Baltimore, Conducted by Hugo Weisgall, Westminster Hi-Fi LP XWN 18858, 1958: side 2, track 7

4 Translated from uncaptioned clippings in Dutch and Yiddish, from an Alter family scrapbook in possession of Alter's nephew, Cantor Benjamin Z. Maissner of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Canada.

5  Akiva Zimmermann, "The Life and Music of Israel Alter, Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of His Birth," Proceedings of the 54th Annual Cantors Assembly Convention, Ellenville, NY, 2001: 70.