Inventing Jewish Music, Again. Reuben Rinder in San Francisco (1913-1962)

Cantor Reuben R. Rinder (1887-1966) was influential in shaping 20th-century Jewish musical culture. Through insights from the Rinder papers and Rose Rinder’s oral history (UC Berkeley), this paper connects Rinder’s approach to Jewish musical leadership with the global yearnings of the San Francisco Jewish community.

Born in Galicia, Rinder acquired cantorial skills from his immediate family. He moved to the US in 1902, held cantorial positions at Temple Beth-El, Brooklyn (1910), and B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan (1912) and in 1913 he became the cantor of Congregation Emanu-El, where he worked until his death in 1966, commissioning works from world-renown composers, including Bloch, Milhaud, Ben-Haim and Lavry, and launching the career of violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. These achievements were the coronation of a multifaceted cultural strategy.

The “Society for the Advancement of Synagogue Music” founded by Rinder in 1927 (with the New York-based Joseph Achron, A. W. Binder, Leon Kramer, and Lazare Saminsky) built upon his early connections with Steven Wise and was modeled after Mordecai Kaplan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism (1922). It also set a new agenda for synagogue music that was deeply rooted in the cosmopolitan outlook of the San Francisco Jewish community and its philanthropic tradition. The confluence of these factors enabled Rinder to pursue a path of musical innovation based on the conception of Jewish communal life as a platform for commissioning new works, building interfaith (and political) connections, and creating deep cultural ties between the US, Europe, and Israel