REV. A. KAISER.

A Memorial Address Delivered before the Central Conference of American Rabbis by DR. ADOLPH GUTTMACHER, of Baltimore.

What Isaac M. Wise, the immortal founder of this Conference, has wrought for the American Rabbinate, Alois Kaiser, the sweet singer in Israel, has wrought for the American Cantorate. During the formative period of American Judaism both men occupied unique positions. Both were bent upon elevating their sacred calling. Both labored manfully for a modern synagogue. Both, in a sense, were not mere producers, but also creators, reshaping the old to meet the changing conditions in American Jewry. Thus, in view of the distinguished services, Alois Kaiser rendered to the synagogue, our Conference at Rochester, 1895, honored itself by making him an honorary member of the Conference. It is, therefore, peculiarly fitting that we should pay tribute to the memory of Alois Kaiser, a true servant in the vineyard of the Lord.

Alois Kaiser was born in 1840 in Szobotist, Hungary. When five years old, his parents had obtained the long coveted privilege of living in Vienna. Here, young Kaiser received his first instruction in the congregational school of Dr. Henry Zirndorf, the sainted teacher of many of us. Later, Kaiser attended the Realschule and the Teachers' Seminary. Showing at an early age talent for music, he was placed into the conservatory. At the age of ten he joined the choir of the celebrated Viennese Cantor, Solomon Sulzer. Sulzer seemed to have been especially drawn to his earnest and gifted pupil, for at the age of fourteen young Kaiser occupied the position of the leading soprano in that famous organization. At the age of nineteen he became the assistant cantor at Funfhaus, a suburb of Vienna. Three years later he received a call to Prague as Cantor of a large congregation. Here he devoted himself to the cultivation of his voice and studied zealously musical theory. Imbued with the spirit of political freedom, that had made his father an active participant in the stirring drama of 1848, Kaiser turned longingly his eyes towards the New World. In 1866 he landed in New York, and four weeks after he was called as Cantor to the Oheb Shalom

Congregation of Baltimore. In that position he remained for fortytwo years to the time of his death, which occurred January 5, 1908. Kaiser's life has memorialized itself in the zealous and painstaking service he gave his congregation, and in the honored and respected name he left behind. He was a faithful worker, a man of unblemished character and of natural dignity. His personality was full of gentleness and mellow sweetness, in grain fine above the common, of high tone and aspirations. He took an active interest in many of those movements that make for the betterment of others, and showed himself a most useful citizen. In brief, his life shed lustre upon the Jewish name. Amid every manifestation of sincere sorrow, his lifeless form was conveyed to his resting place on earth from the synagogue, in which for over four decades he had intoned prayers and pæons to the glory of Israel's God.

Alois Kaiser's career was transfused by the consciousness that living is giving, giving the best of which one is capable. This ex plains the honored place which Kaiser occupied in that larger congregation, the congregation of Israel. To be a ', the leader of the congregation in public worship filled him with sacred awe, and with a deep sense of responsibility. His prayer and song were always vocal with deep religious fervor. The note of perfunctoriness, that only too often robs a service of its devoutness, could never be discerned when Kaiser officiated, nor could anyone ever have accused him of being unctuous. Listening to him, one felt the telepathic influence of a sincere soul.

The tendency of the modern synagogue to dispense with the services of the Cantor was a source of great grief to him. That the synagogue would suffer by it was his earnest conviction. The blame for the attitude of the synagogue towards the Cantor, he placed upon the Cantor himself. For he believed that there was still room in the snyagogue for the Cantor who could read and understand the signs of the times. Repeatedly did he express himself to me that the modern Cantor should be familiar with the traditions of his calling, adapt himself to the changing of religious and social requirements and fit himself to co-operate, intelligently and sympathetically, with the work of the pulpit. This was the keynote of all his addresses

before the Society of American Cantors, and the burden of the advice that he gave to his colleagues.

Kaiser loved his calling most enthusiastically, for he knew the tradition of it and never ceased learning more about it. In a Necrologue, one of our colleagues speaks of him as follows: "He followed the traditions of the Sulzer School, and for more than four decades of honorable service to his congregation, he gave the best that was in him to the cause of rendering the music of the synagogue worthy of its name and expressive of the thoughts and feelings basic to Jewish worship." Kaiser deeply venerated the memory of Sulzer. No opportunity passed without his paying loving tribute to the memory of the father of modern synagogal music. At the celebration of the one hundredth birthday anniversary of Sulzer, held in New York March, 1904, under the auspices of the Society of American Cantors, and later at a similar service, held by our Conference in Louisville, he lovingly reviewed the work of his great master and showed Sulzer's abiding influence upon the Jewish liturgy. Kaiser admired most in Sulzer the Jewishness of his compositions, he characterized Sulzer's work as "beseelt vom Juedischen Geiste." To impress this Jewishness upon the service of the synagogue was almost a passion with Kaiser. Thus he says in his presidential address before the Society of American Cantors in 1904, "In spite of the numerous publications of Jewish music within the past twentyfive years, the synagogue in America has borrowed too much from the church, the opera, and the concert stage, so much so, that in some Jewish houses of worship Jewish melodies have about entirely disappeared. It is for this society to restore them again." And in the report of the committee on Synagogal Music, made to this Conference at the last convention, he says, "Of music, especially composed for the service that by Jews should receive the preference over that by non-Jews."

Kaiser was the one cantor to whom the smaller congregations all over the land would turn when they wanted music for the divine service, they felt confident that Kaiser would know what they required. Thus many of his compositions have found a permanent place in the American synagogue.

But brief mention I shall make of his publications. His Magnum Opus is the Zimrath-Yah in four volumes, which he published in collaboration with three other cantors. The first volume made its appearance in 1871, the last in 1885. In 1894 this Conference asked the co-operation of the Cantors' Association to provide music for the Union prayer book. In 1897 Kaiser and Sparger published the Union Hymnal. For several years Kaiser had sole charge of the printing and distribution of the Hymnal. Though this work required a great deal of his time, he did it cheerfully and without any compensation. One of the important contributions to Jewish music in America, he considered the volume published by him and Sparger as a souvenir to the Jewish Women's Congress, held as a part of the World's Parliament of Religions at Chicago. It contains the principal melodies of the synagogue, from the earliest time, with an introductory essay on the liturgical chant of the synagogue. Besides these Kaiser set to music several psalms and many hymns. He also contributed several articles to the Jewish Encyclopedia, and published several pamphlets upon the sphere of the Cantor. His life was well spent, "it made the sunshine brighter and the clouds less. dense." What a higher tribute can a man receive than that. Our "The righteous

צדיקים במיתתם נקראים חיים : teachers of old say

dead are called living." They live in the happier sphere to which God has removed them. But they live, too, in the hearts of those whom they have blessed by their goodness and ennobled by their good example.

C.

SAMSON RAPHAEL HIRSCH.1

In Honor of the Centenary of His Birth, by RABBI MAX HELLER,

of New Orleans.

Serious difficulties confront the American student of our day who endeavors to limn with a firm hand some great Jewish figure of the past century, to represent its proporInitial Obstacles. tions with unpartisan justice, to assign its place in the gallery of our Gaonim, its func

tion in the progressive phases of our religious unfoldment. "The tumult and the shouting" of the Reform battle are far from having died; the risks of optical delusion in judging proportions from too short a distance we share with other students of modern phases; to all this is added our oft-lamented poverty in genuine biographical material, a dearth upon the causes of which I need not enter, the vast difference of our Jewish environment from those of Europe, last, rather first, our comparative deficiency in the heavy armament of technical Jewish scholarship. To sit in judgment, e. g., over a man who has sailed up and down the immensities of the Talmudical ocean, who has charted its winds, sounded its depths, is a precarious enterprise for one who is a mere tyro in that arduous discipline; to pronounce a decision between battling giants is to insert one's head between the clashing mountains.

Under the consciousness of all these disabilities I venture with more than diffidence upon the task of appraising a man whose greatness as a factor in the struggles of his day is beyond dispute, a man to whom I have been unable to find any trustworthy approach through personal tradition, whom I am attempting to judge only from the disjecta membra of his writings and of the printed replies, reports and comments of his contemporaries, yet whose strength seems to have lain in personal influence and organizing perseverance, far more than in literary or scholarly achievement,

Samson Raphael Hirsch was born (June 20, 1808) into a time when the shallow Schoengeis terei of the Meassfim had followed hard upon the fine sunburst of the MenEarly Environment. delssohn-Lessing era; his childhood fell into the splendid period of Germany's awaking

1After the paper had been read, a number of notes were embodied from the Jubilaeums-Nummer of the "Israelit” which came to hand subsequently.