Before Joel Lichterman became the cantor at Chizuk Amuno Congregation, he was a young man in South Africa with an affinity for music.
“My career was not going to be that of a cantor. I was going to be a concert pianist,” he told The Baltimore Jewish Times.
Growing up, he graduated from Herzlia Day school in Cape Town, South Africa. While in school, he took private piano lessons and participated in performance examinations through The Royal College of Music in London and Trinity College in Dublin, which included piano performance, composition, choral conducting and counterpoint.
“The Royal College of Music [was] like the Harvard of that part of the world, and we would do exams and the examiners would come out once a year, and we would go through this whole procedure of performance, choral conducting, those of my sort of areas,” explained Lichterman.
By young adulthood, he had progressed to the highest level of performance exams. At the same time, Lichterman said he knew music couldn’t be the sole way he made a living, so he also attended the University of Cape Town for economics and industrial sociology.
Post-graduation, Lichterman had a successful career in retail. He started his career working for Woolworths PTY Ltd in South Africa. There, he established and grew the company’s footwear department division and became a senior executive.
“There was this commercial career and my music, and I couldn’t balance the two. [Eventually] you have to decide; music is the hobby, commerce is the way you make a living,” he explained. “But then in the late ’70s, this call to the cantorate became stronger and stronger.”
Lichterman was the son of Jakub Lichterman, a renowned cantor and Holocaust survivor originally from Warsaw, where he was the Hazzan in what is today Warsaw’s only surviving Nozick synagogue, and was known in South Africa to be the “Cantor’s Cantor.”
“He wrote a book for us, my brother and myself, which literally encompassed every aspect of the High Holidays, from the first evening service all the way through the early morning service all the way to the end of Yom Kippur, everything that we would ever need,” he said. “290 pages of music all in Hebrew, and we studied page by page, section by section, word for word, literally, so that we were fully equipped, at least, to understand the liturgy and to be able to deliver the liturgy.”
“But I was never really trained to be a full-time candidate, that was not on my agenda,” he added.
The first time Lichterman officiated as a cantor was at a Rosh Hashanah service in the late 1970s, when he was asked to stand in for a synagogue’s cantor.
Because of his musical background and having been trained by his father, Lichterman ended up performing the entire High Holiday services.
“After I completed that first full High Holidays, I found that my voice was tired,” Lichterman said. “I spoke to my dad on the phone, and these were his words to me with a bit of a Polish accent, ‘If you want to swim the English Channel, you’d better exercise.’ Where he came from that I don’t know, and that’s where I realized that I’d have to begin voice production. I’ve got to really do something with this instrument.”
By the mid-1980s, Lichterman worked part-time as a cantor in conjunction with his commercial career at a small synagogue in a new suburb of Cape Town that he helped establish. There, he led High Holiday services, bar mitzvahs and more. He trained children and men’s choirs and eventually took over the Cape Towson Jewish Choral Society, a mixed choir of about 60 to 65 singers.
A few years later, he was approached by the Great Synagogue of South Africa, Cape Town’s Garden Shul, which he said was “a great honor” and became a senior Hazzan.
There, he was asked to help revitalize the choir, becoming the Hazzan of the synagogue, where he would officiate with a large choir to perform at all services and on live national radio broadcasts for Passover and year-end holidays.
“But things had been changing in South Africa for some time, not only on the political horizon, but our kids were concerned about what their careers would be. Are they going to go to a university in South Africa? What are they going to do? And with this changing landscape, I began to explore opportunities overseas,” Lichterman said.
In 1995, Lichterman came to the U.S. as a Hazzan at Denver’s BMH-BJ congregation. However, while there, he did more than just cantorial work. He fundraised, helped with budgeting and led services. He also created the Cantor’s Cultural Committee, bringing Israeli performers to Denver for largescale Jewish concerts. After serving the Denver congregation for many years, he became Cantor emeritus and still keeps many of his connections there to this day.
In 2018, Lichterman decided he wanted to focus on the pieces of his work he really cared about — music, prayer and spiritual leadership — rather than the administrative load. During that search, he found his way to Chizuk Amuno.
“I wanted to continue, but in a different mold, because in Denver, Colorado, I was doing a lot more than the cantorate,” he said. “I was looking not as a second career, but as an extension of my career. I was looking to be more focused on the things that I really wanted to do, as opposed to the things that I was required to do.”
Lichterman started within days of the congregation’s senior rabbi, Rabbi Joshua Gruenberg, and he said when he started working with the rabbi and the rest of the clergy team, “we clicked. It just worked.”
“I have found that the impact that the synagogue musical life can have on one’s spiritual being is tremendous,” he added. “It’s very inspiring.”
At Chizuk Amuno, Lichterman directs the synagogue’s flagship bnai mitzvah program.
“I feel I can impact many young emerging young Jewish adults and their families, where I can make an impact on their spiritual lives,” he said. “Through equipping them with skills which they can develop and utilize for the rest of their lives — and quite a number of them do.”
In addition to working at Chizuk Amuno, Lichterman continues to perform, not only in Maryland, but nationally and internationally, as well.
“I hope to continue impacting congregation and audiences way outside of Maryland,” he added.
