To BF From Richard Koch: newspapers.com.” It’s from John Philip Sousa’s March 7, 1932 obituary in the Asbury Park Press.”
Here is our link regarding the Wet/Dry incident in OG:
And what about Sousa’s inviting a cantor to Ocean Grove:
Cantor “Josef” Rosenblatt,
My father loved to listen to cantorial music on the radio. There was one station from New York that carried Jewish music. I would sit in the back seat of his car and listen to that music which was operatic in its style.
One cantor on the radio was Yossela Rosenblatt who was considered to be the greatest cantor.
So here he is mentioned in this newsclip from Richard Koch, and amazingly, Cantor Yossela Rosenblatt is appearing with Sousa in the Great Auditorium and is called “Josef” and is described as “a noted Russian tenor.”
This story is another involving Ocean Grove’s secular history. I wonder if the CMA knew in 1926 that a Jewish religious figure was on stage, undoubtedly singing secular (operatic) music. We don’t have the program.
The CMA of that time was busy getting involved in a secular issue: supporting Prohibition.
Sousa was a famous bandleader and composer with a sense of humor. He offended the CMA with his humorous choice of “Follow the Swallow” in the OG program. There CMA never invited him back.
Ironically the Sousa march “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is played all the time in the GA. A painting of Sousa hangs in the Historical Society of Ocean Grove.
Would you like to hear what cantorial music sounds like? Here is Cantor Yossela Rosenblatt performing “Kol Nidrei” a profoundly important prayer for Yom Kippur. You can hear an organ and a choir in this recording, but those accompaniments were found only in Reform congregations.
George. I never used or heard of the word “Christianize.” And I know nothing about the Pennsylvania “insistence” that you refer to.
My articles are about how the Camp Meeting Association has been expanding its Christian programming presence in the Grove while essentially ignoring the predominantly secular residential community. OG needs a working balance in its demographics.
At Blogfinger we don’t have anything to say about their religion, but they have expressed a desire to turn this town into a “Christian Seaside Community”
It seems that they want to return the Grove to something like what it was 150 years ago when the residents were mostly religious Methodists.
That is not practical or best for this historic town, and I don’t think it represents the sentiment of most of us who are secular and who live here.
Thanks, Paul
One of the first talking movies. “the Jazz Singer” featured Al Jolson who was from a family of cantors, and the movie was about the story of a young man who preferred jazz to his family’s history of cantorial music.
Richard Tucker, of the Metropolitan Opera, was also a cantor. I knew his son David who interned with me at Mt. Sinai Hospital.
Is there an analogy between the current CMA drive to “Christianize” OG and the nearby rightwing Pennsylvanian insistence on a wholly Christian state?
George Held