June 27, 2008
by Rachel Rosin
On Sunday, June 1, Temple Beth El celebrated Cantor Dana Anesi’s twenty five years of service to the congregation. A special concert to mark the occasion, featuring the choir of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s School of Sacred Music, was held at the temple.
While growing up in Freehold, New Jersey, Cantor Anesi had no idea that her childhood love of music would lead to her chosen career. She began to prepare for her bat mitzvah at age 13, which according to Jewish law is the age when Jewish children reach their majority and become responsible for their actions.
Creating her own service of bat mitzvah
Cantor Anesi gives much credit for her interest in Judaism to her rabbi at the time, Peter Kasdan, who encouraged her to take responsibility for creating her own music service. This type of Bat Mitzvah service, in which she played guitar, was almost unheard of in those days. While still in high school, she became an active member of her youth group as well as a song leader for the Jersey Federation of Temple Youth. After attending a Jewish summer camp, she decided to pursue her career as a cantor.
She didn’t even know what it meant to be a cantor
In the Jewish religion, the cantor is the religious celebrant who leads the musical part of a service by chanting. There were very few cantors in the early 1970’s in the Reform movement and there were none serving her congregation in Englishtown. As she says, “sometimes you just know when something feels right” and “I just knew that I wanted to be a part of working with the Jewish community.”
She began at the Reform movement’s seminary, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in its School of Sacred Music, which was then a five-year bachelor’s degree program, after a year at Rutgers University. Today’s students are required to attend four years of undergraduate school and then complete five years of a master’s program in sacred music.
Cantor Anesi notes that when she began school she knew very little about what it meant to be a cantor. There were few role models and she knew nothing about cantorial chant, or “chazzanut.” In the era of the more “classical Reform” Judaism of the 1960’s and 70’s, she knew basic synagogue melodies, along with music of the youth movement, and some popular Israeli tunes, but, as she tells her students today, they know more about chanting than she did when she started cantorial school!
Temple Beth El’s first full time Cantor
There were only three women in the cantorial program when she entered Hebrew Union College in 1975, the same year that the first woman cantor, Cantor Barbara Ostfeld, was invested.
When she began at Temple Beth El there was no full time cantor; the congregation had only student cantors from the School of Sacred Music up until that time. Cantor Anesi came to Temple Beth El only part-time at first, having just given birth to her son. However, Chaim Stern, Temple Beth El’s rabbi at the time, anticipated a probable need for a full time cantor, and so she was hired in 1982, becoming a full-time cantor a year or so later.
What lies ahead
In July, Temple Beth El will welcome another cantor, Ellen Dreskin, who will work part-time and assist Cantor Anesi with some of her duties. The two go back a long ways as they know each other from youth group programs they attended.
The need for more cantorial help at Temple Beth El is apparent as the bar and bat mitzvah load grows increasingly larger each year. In addition to the burgeoning membership of the congregation, there are also more meetings, programs and other life cycle events for all the members of the clergy to attend to.
Cantor Anesi is extremely proud of the fact that several of her students over the years at Temple Beth El have chosen to pursue careers as rabbis; one was ordained last year, and another just a month ago, at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. In addition, many of her former students, now in their 20’s and 30’s, ask her to officiate at their weddings, another source of great joy for her.
Cantor Anesi is very involved with the alumni associations of the School of Sacred Music, and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in general, and in July, she will become chair of the college’s Alumni Council, which represents all the alumni associations of the school. She was recently appointed to the Board of Governors of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She is also a student, and for the last two years has been attending the college, studying for a Doctor of Ministry degree. Having just completed the course work and awarded a certificate in pastoral counseling, pending completion of a final project, she hopes to gain her doctorate in the coming months.
Cantor Anesi lives in Chappaqua and has one son, David Troupp, 26 years old, who is a student at Benjamin Cardozo Law School in New York City.
Copyright 2008 NewCastleNOW.org