"The best story about the Choir?" muses Stanisław Rybarczyk, the Choir's founder and conductor. "In fact, we don't even know if we are twenty years old. Jerzy Kichler (the then Wroclaw Jewish Community Leader) says that our first performance was in 1995. I think it was a year later. These discrepancies are due to the way you count years according to the Jewish calendar. I think this kind of haziness is beautiful because it makes you feel the breath of eternity The Choir is the adventure of my life," says Stanisław Rybarczyk.
White Stork Synagogue Choir in 20th Anniversary Concert
13 September 2016, 7 pm 
White Stork Synagogue
20 years passed
The jubilee celebrations were inaugurated during 18. SIMCHA Jewish Culture Festival in Wroclaw with a concert featuring Yoseph Schwartz, a young cantor from Israel. On 6 September, the Choir performed at the newly opened Ulm Family Museum, a venue dedicated to Poles rescuing Jews during the Second World War. A day later it gave a concert at the Subcarpathian Philharmonic with the Joseph Malovany, the most distinguished cantor of our time and a great friend of the Choir, and the Subcarpathian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Stanisław Rybarczyk. The concerts to follow will be held in Wroclaw (13.09.2016, White Stork Synagogue) and Berlin (14.09.2016, Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue) and featuring Cantor Moshe Fishel. On Sunday 18th September, the Choir is going to perform at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews with an organ accompaniment from the eminent Piotr Rojek, their regular collaborator.
"I remember our first concert. The White Stork Synagogue was in ruin at the time, nobody even dreamt about rebuilding or renovating it. We would sing in the balcony. With half of the roof missing, the rain would fall inside, but you could also hear the birds. This was like a portent of a miracle, which came when the Jewish Community reclaimed the synagogue," says Stanisław Rybarczyk.
Powerful voices
There are 13 people in the choir, both male and female, most of them the graduates or students of the Wroclaw Academy of Music. "So we will never sing in an Orthodox synagogue. Women have no right of entry. The synagogue choirs are in fact Reformed synagogue choirs anyway," explains the conductor. "It wasn't that easy to begin. Marta Ostern, the then Jewish Community Secretary, had a collection of Jewish songs on cassette tapes. We would listen to the music and then seek scores and songbooks. We found a copy of a songbook created by Moritz Deutsch, Wroclaw Synagogue Cantor, Choir Conductor and Professor of the Rabbi Seminar in pre-war Breslau," he reminisces. "A lot of people started to share their collections on hearing that we were forming a synagogue choir. Some songs would even come by fax from Budapest, Hungary, as well as from Israel and the United States.
Choir music emerged in synagogues in Germany and in Austria in the 19th century following Israel Jacobson's reform. People began to sing in synagogues, you could also hear organ music. This was unique because music has been prohibited in the synagogue since 70 AD, when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans," explains Stanisław Rybarczyk. "I wouldn't be able to create the ensemble with ethnic Jews only. Two or three people in the choir are Jewish by origin, but all of the singers have powerful voices.
Choir and eminent cantors
Wroclaw's White Stork Synagogue Choir performed with a number of eminent cantors, including Joseph Malovany from New York, Alberto Mizrahi from Chicago, Moshe Schulhof from Miami, Roslyn Barak from San Francisco, Shmuel Barzilai from Vienna, Moshe Stern from Jerusalem /Great Synagogue Cantor/, Laszlo Fekete from Budapest, Avitall Gerstetter from Berlin, David Ullmann from Jerusalem, Israel Rand from Tel-Aviv.
The Choir were also featured in a number of festivals, including Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków, "Wratislavia Cantans" Festival, Sacred Music Festival in Warsaw, Stage Song Review in Wroclaw, Gaude Mater Festival in Częstochowa, Music Festival in Łańcut. They also performed at the International Book Fair in Frankfurt am Main and the Cristal Nacht commemorative ceremonies in Hannover, Brunswick, Berlin, Hamburg and Goerlitz.
The Choir also accompany synagogue service during Jewish religious festivals and other ceremonies organised by the Jewish Community in Wroclaw. They collaborate with the European Jewish Music Centre in Hannover, which is directed by Andor Izsàk.
They have recorded quite a few CD, including "Shalom", which was released in 1998 by Koch International. The singers were also featured in Justyna Steczkowska's Alkimija, collecting traditional Jewish songs in Roman Kołakowski and Mateusz Pospieszalski's arrangement. The Choir performed programmes with jazz saxophonist Piotr Baron, Norwegian artist Bente Kahan and the actors from the Polski Theatre in Wroclaw. In 2005, the White Stork Synagogue Choir performed in Berlin's Parieserplatz in collaboration with the Lower Silesia Polish-German Young Philharmonic Orchestra and Cantor Joseph Malovany to celebrate the unveiling of the The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Great friend of the Choir
The programme of the Wroclaw jubilee concert features a number of works by eminent synagogue music composers, including Louis Lewandowski. "The programme of the show has been designed to bring out all the artistic qualities of the Choir while representing the unique world of synagogue singing, where emotions, expression and passion have a pride of place. The world's most celebrated cantors made an indelible mark on the Choir's singing style and the way they feel and understand music. One of the world's most distinguished cantors Joseph Malovany, who is also a great friend of the choir, has been collaborating with our ensemble for nearly 20 years now," says Stanisław Rybarczyk.
