Welcome to the 2008 Jewish Music Festival

EVENT: Benzion Miller

Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Listen to Vechach haya omer

Order tickets online now for Benzion Miller

Netivot Shalom
1316 University Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702

$21 JCC East Bay/Netivot members, seniors and students $25 non-members

Beloved by millions for his cantorial performances throughout the world, Cantor Benzion Miller thrills audiences with his brilliant tenor voice, his astonishing vocal technique and above all with the heartfelt spirituality of his interpretations of cantorial concert masterpieces. Based in Borough Park Brooklyn, Cantor Miller will make his Bay Area debut as part of the 23rd Jewish Music Festival.

A descendant of several generations of cantors, Miller began singing at a very early age. He studied at Bobover yeshivot first in Brooklyn and then in Israel, where he came under the tutelage of the well-known cantor Shmuel Taube. He also benefited from the many accomplished hazzanim who had come from Europe to Israel as refugees. He began his career as cantor of the Hillside Jewish Center in Hillside, New Jersey and subsequently held positions in the Bronx, Montreal, and Toronto. Since 1981 he has been cantor of Temple Beth El of Borough Park in Brooklyn (now known as the Young Israel Beth-El of Borough Park), a pulpit previously served by such illustrious cantors as Mordechai Hershman, Berele Chagy, and Moshe Koussevitzky.

Cantor Miller’s exceptionally busy concert schedule includes a number of performances each year at Israel’s major venues, and at concerts, festivals, and conferences throughout Europe, Great Britain, Australia, and North America. He has been a cantorial soloist at concerts in such disparate places as Johannesburg and Cape Town, Mombasa, Alaska, and Brazil. He has sung with the Israel Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony, the Haifa Symphony, the Barcelona Symphony, the English Players and the Budapest State Opera orchestra. He was part of the first group of cantors to perform in the Soviet-bloc countries before the fall of the iron curtain. He made his Royal Festival Hall (London) debut in 1990 in the premiere of Neil Levin’s production Voice of Jewish Russia, and he sang with the City of Oxford Symphony at the Barbican Centre in 1998.

Cantor Miller has made more than a dozen recordings of Hassidic and other Hebrew liturgical/cantorial and Yiddish music, in some of these preserving much of the authentic Bobover musical tradition. He also is continually expanding the Bobover repertoire with new tunes of his own in the same vein and through his recordings of songs created in America by the third Bobover rebbe.

Accompanied by Daniel Gildar on piano.

Co-sponsored by the Gottesman-Biddle Family

Performer bios:

• Daniel Gildar
• Benzion Miller

The Jewish Music Festival is a program of the
Jewish Community Center of the East Bay (JCCEB)