This Week
Cover Story
in New Rochelle, a post that continued after gradua-
tion until he entered the Army during the Korean
War.
After leaving the service, where he was an acting
chaplain at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and at the
Edgewood Army Chemical Center in Maryland, he
resumed a concert tour in the U.S. and Canada.
He'd been offered a contract with the Metropolitan
Opera Company, but decided to first honor a per-
formance agreement in Tulsa, Okla. There, the course
of his life made an interesting turn, leading him once
again into the synagogue.
"A group of 10 oilmen decided to give me as a gift
to the congregation," he says of the start of six years at
another Temple Israel.
Planting Roots
Cantor Orbach met Rabbi M. Robert Syme of
Detroit's Temple Israel at a national convention in the
late 1950s. "He tried for three years to talk me into
coming to Detroit," the cantor says. "Now we've been
together for 40 years."
"One of the luckiest things is that I am at a place
with the most wonderful clergy staff," Cantor Orbach
says of Rabbis Harold Loss, Paul Yedwab, Joshua
Bennett and Marla Hornsten, Cantor Lori Corrsin
and now-Rabbi Emeritus Syme.
"We are all friends," says Rabbi Loss. 'All of the cler-
gy families are close to one another and we hope that
relationship permeates the whole atmosphere of the
institution."
Cantor Orbach is the 61-year-old synagogue's sec-
ond cantor, taking his post in 1962, following the
death of Cantor Robert Tulman. The temple moved to
West Bloomfield in 1980. In 1999, Cantor Orbach
was joined at Temple Israel by Cantor Corrsin, follow-
ing a search he helped coordinate — bringing the for-
mer Southfield High graduate here from a New York
synagogue.
"Cantor Orbach was very gracious and very wel-
coming," she says. "We work very well together."
Cantor Orbach has encouraged his counterpart to
write music. "He loves for me to try out new things
and he loves to sing duets," she says. "He gives me a
lot of scope for my talent — to be able to take a
melody I love and rewrite it for the two of us."
Their professional relationship, says Cantor
Corrsin, is complementary and balanced. "He has a
very strong, commanding presence and I am much
softer," she says.
"Having a man and woman team makes people
feel like there is a mother and a father on the
bimah — warm and protective."
Temple Life
Many students have benefited from Cantor
Orbach's expertise as a teacher at Temple.Israel and
in the community.
"I have tried to have an active musical program
in my congregation for children of all ages so that
our heritage may go from generation to genera-
tion," he says.
"He has motivated a minyan [quorum] of young
students to become cantors," says Norton Stern,
Temple Israel president, of 10 current cantors who
were former students of Cantor Orbach. Five attended
the Oct. 7 festivities honoring the cantor, coming
from various parts of the country to sing at the cele-
bration marking the cantor's four decades at the tem-
ple as well as his 70th birthday.
Cantor Orbach also has been an inspiration to
youth in other ways.
"Over 20 years ago, when he heard that my young son
Scott played the organ, he came over to our house,
Stern says. "He heard him play and sang songs from
Fiddler on the Roof and asked him to be the junior organ-
ist at temple. Scott is still the 'cantor' and piano player at
family services on the High Holidays — at 33."
But more than the encouragement the cantor gave
the young musician was what Stern describes as a "per-
sonal interest in kids."
"He was worried that when he came to hear Scott
play the organ, my younger son Ken would see his
brother getting all the adulation. Making certain he
recognized both of them, he took Ken in as a shofarist,
a role he kept for four or five years."
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Clockwise from top left:
A poster of the cantor signed
by religious school students
on his 15th anniversary
at Temple Israel.
Cantor Orbach sings
at Tiger Stadium
in Detroit in the 1980s.
Harold Orbach, 5, and his
brother Gerald, 8, in Germany.
The cantor greets U.S. Sen.
Carl Levin, D-Mich., and
the senator's wifi, Barbara,
in the 1990s.
Cantor Orbach with siddur,
alongside a fellow serviceman
blowing the shofar during the
High Holidays at Aberdeen
Proving Grounds during the
Korean Conflict.
10/12
2001
32
Cantor Orbach with
Cardinal Adam Maida
of the Archdiocese of Detroit
in 1994.
Social Action
Much of the cultural programming that Cantor
Orbach coordinates also includes a social action corn-
ponen t.
Many of his concerts have been dedicated to issues
seeking to integrate and bring harmony to differing
religious and cultural traditions.
"Outreach to the Chaldean, Christian, Muslim and
black communities has won him national acclaim,"
Stern says.
Three Faiths in Jazz, a 1969 program at Ford
Auditorium in Detroit arranged with the Rev. Deirn J.
Geard of Fort Street United Presbyterian Church and
Father Tom Grady of St. Jude Catholic Church, was
attended by 1,000 people of each of the faiths involved.
"And we made sure we divided the tickets in such a
way so as to integrate the seating," Cantor Orbach says
of the program that also raised money for the United
Negro College Fund.