Breaking Down the Barricades: An Interview with Barbara Ostfeld

Barbara Jean Ostfeld is the first woman ordained as a cantor. After her historic ordination in 1975, she served Congregation Beth El in Great Neck, NY (1976–1988), Temple B'rith Kodesh in Rochester, NY (1988–1990) and Temple Beth Am (now Congregation Shir Shalom) in Buffalo, NY (1990–2002), and as the Placement Director for the American Conference of Cantors (2002–2012). Acknowledgements of her professional success include an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institue of Religion and the Debbie Friedman Award from the Union for Reform Judaism.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell me about how you got started in music. 

My formal training started when my mother took me for piano lessons. I learned a little bit of piano and continued to study. And the cantor in my synagogue, whose voice just sounded so majestic to me and so stirred my soul--I would imitate him, pretending to be him. Those were my earliest ventures into music.

I think I was 15 when I begged my parents for a harpsichord and they found one. I just thought I was the luckiest girl around to have a harpsichord. I played Bach inventions and other sorts of things on it and it gave me great pleasure.

I was also in a madrigal group through school and our select chorus went to all-state competitions and those were very exciting. I learned that there were many people who loved music as I did and who were so opened up by the double choir sound and trumpets echoing back and forth. It was just sublime.

What were some of your formative experiences with music in the synagogue?

Cantor Ostfeld discusses early experiences in the synagogue with her family.

We went on what we used to call family nights at the temple. And those were the ones that were welcoming to children. And that featured the children's choir and the choral leaders, and I was one of them. It was the high point of every week for me. My mother would light the candles and we would have a Shabbat dinner. Then we would go to temple and it was everything. Feeling the organ through my feet, it all came together when the ark was open, something in me opened, and I was captured.

The music was [Solomon] Sulzer and [Louis] Lewandowski's greatest hits. This was at the height of the Classical Reform movement. And we used the Union Prayer Book, which was written in Elizabethan English, and which I thought was very fancy and very important. The songs that we sang were very traditional Reform-composed pieces. We sang hymns and mostly we sang in English.

Martin Rosen was the cantor, and he was kind of my idol. He was delightful and he was nurturing, and he smiled a lot, and he drew out children. He certainly drew me out. I took his suggestion and began to study [voice] when I was 11 years old.

I understand you went to camp. Did that experience influence your decision to pursue a career in the cantorate?

I loved camp. We called it Camp Okonomowoc back in the day. It was a Union of American Hebrew Congregations camp, now URJ (Union Reform Judaism), but there was great music there. The music defined the daily worship, and it was the daily worship, the coming together of the community for worship, which we designed and created that just made it come home to me. I always had thought of worship as being something that is put on for you as you sit in the pew. And, at camp it arose out of what we were studying, the nature around us, the camaraderie that we shared, and the young voices.

I became very serious about Judaism and Torah study as a camper at Okonomowoc and I decided then that I wanted to learn to play the guitar. So, I taught myself over a summer with a chord book. It was before Debbie Friedman, before Jeff Klepper and Danny Freelander, so the world had not yet been set on fire by their music.

It was the immersion in the camp experience that introduced me to the way of life that I sought to have for myself. A life in community, a life punctuated by sacred music, a life in which Torah study and deep questions were part of an everyday discipline. I had wanted to be a cantor when I was a little girl, but it became more of a serious and more tightly focused ambition of mine at camp.

What was it like being the only woman at Hebrew Union College?

Being the only woman at Hebrew Union College was odd, and I knew that there was a weirdness to it, because up until that time, if you saw a woman on the bima in a synagogue, she was giving the sisterhood report, or making announcements, or saying something about the oneg. Despite the fact that behind the scenes, the women were running the synagogue. I came to school, and it was a sea of men.

Barbara Ostfeld's historic ordination in 1975 as America's first female cantor.
From left: Alfred Gottschalk, Barbara Ostfeld, Jerome Krasnow, Jerome Holland and Dean Paul Steinberg

They were a lovely bunch of people, and I had great friendships with them. But it was isolating. I was lonely. I had no female companionship, and the cantorial students and certainly the rabbinic students, were all much older than I was. Therefore, I also felt like a little sister. There wasn't social life because Hebrew Union College on West 68th Street did not have a campus, and so all we had was a student lounge and it was vacated as soon as the school day was over because students were rushing to their student pulpit activities and to teaching one thing or another.

I missed the camaraderie of high school, but the students were unequivocally kind to me. It was only some of the faculty members who were dubious or even hostile, although some were quite nurturing and saw that women's time had come and embraced it. On Purim it was a ritual joke to change the signs on all the ladies’ rooms to say Barbara's.

I was wondering if there was one particular faculty member who was nurturing to you?

Cantor Arthur Wolfson, of blessed memory, who was quite a musician, quite a singer, quite an administrator, and also beloved by everyone. He was the Cantor of Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. He was a very humble teacher and he drew me out. He saw something in me and he nurtured it. He desperately tried to get me to open my mouth more widely so that more sound could come out.

But there was the countervailing difficulty of those faculty members who saw me as an imposter or a pretender. I would finish chanting a piece of nusaḥ of liturgical music in class and one of the professors would regularly look at me and say, "You think you're a very clever young lady, don't you?" As if I were putting on some kind of a show instead of being a student who learned the material.

There was a terrible episode when I was a second-year student. I'd been given a great honor to chant from the Megillah on Purim and I hadn't studied Megillat Esther trope yet. I had only studied Torah trope and Haftarah trope, so I had to learn it. Then I had to make sure that my Hebrew was perfect. I was so focused on doing it right and getting the the cantillation signs right that I wasn't thinking about the meaning of the words as they came out of my mouth. So, at one point I saw a rather well-known biblical scholar who was on the faculty. He got up from his seat and he started to take off his jacket. He started to loosen his tie and he made to get undressed. He's coming up onto the bima toward me. I realized that I was chanting the verse that said, shouted by the king to Haman. "And you mean to ravish my wife in front of me in my own palace." He was going to enact that, of course at my expense. It was a very devastating moment for me when I realized that instead of having been given an honor, I had been made to stand up and suffer the ridicule in front of everyone.

Israel Alter's Esa Einai, featuring Cantor Barbara Ostfeld.

Many of the faculty members of the School of Sacred Music were not Reform cantors. They were traditional cantors, and it was clear that their image of the cantor was entirely male and there was no budging from that view.

So the conductor would say to me, "I realize I have to let you in this class, but I don't want to hear your voice." He didn't want to muddy the purity of the male choral sound. So for the first year when we performed at various synagogues, I would lip-sync. The second year of my schooling, that ended because two additional women entered the school, and I guess they saw which way the wind was blowing. There was no lip-syncing after that.

You worked at Temple Beth El of Great Neck from 1976 to 1988. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your role there and how that synagogue functioned with a woman cantor back in the 70s and early 80s. 

Temple Beth-El of Great Neck was a very large synagogue. There were approximately 90 to 100 b'nai mitzvah students per year, so most of my time was spent tutoring those students. And I had a children's choir and I had an adult volunteer choir, but I wasn't involved in anything beyond those activities. I did not make hospital calls at that time. I did not teach adult education. I was not a presence in the community. I was really plugged into the machine of this very active, very vibrant congregation. And it was only after those twelve years at Beth El of Great Neck that I realized that there was room in other congregations of smaller sizes to be a part of the teaching core of the synagogue – to work with rabbinic colleagues toward adult education projects, and women's groups, and book groups and language study and communal responsibility. 

Temple Beth-El confirmation group photo with Cantor Ostfeld (right).

Certainly there were so many challenges to your profession. I was wondering if you could talk about the rewards. 

It's hard to choose among the rewards of my profession. There's the moment when you are facing the bride and groom knowing that the bride was someone you trained as she became a bat mitzvah. And the continuity of connection between one generation and the next is just very compelling. There were times when we brought the children's choir to a nursing home and saw some of the residents come alive when they heard the children singing. And the children saw and understood the nature of the gift that they were bringing.

My kids' choir sang the opera “Brundibár,” which was performed during the Holocaust in Theresienstadt. We had a congregant who had been in the chorus of one of those Holocaust era performances. He was a child in the chorus, but he remembered it and he would talk to the children on occasion about his experience as a kid behind bars.

And then there are those liturgical moments when you’re at the end of Yom Kippur and declare “Adonai hu ha'elohim” several times. It just means something different every time you recite it, and it envelops you each time those words are repeated.

What kinds of challenges do you feel women cantors have faced in professional life?

In the early days, there was a lot of chatter that we were meant to overhear. “I wonder what the cantor wears under her robe.” Many rabbis and cantors of my generation will tell you that they heard variations of that. There were always the exclamations at the beginning of our entry into Jewish life. “Oh, my God, the cantor is a girl.” What do we call you? Cantarina, cantarella. And looking back, it's amusing. At the time, it was not so amusing. There were many moments for women in the rabbinate and in the cantorate where our work was respected to a certain degree. But then if there was a funeral, they wanted a male officiant. That was somehow above our pay grade. And of course, there was always the pay inequality, and it persists even to this day. I had comments about my shoes: that they were too casual for the bima, or the black of them didn't match the black of my robe, or they were ornamented – they had buckles or something. Some women in the congregation who had a notion that they could save me from drabness and inappropriate dress by taking me shopping. I also was taken to have my makeup done as a very young cantor. So, there were many attempts to improve my appearance, and none of them succeeded. 

Ben Steinberg's Shalom Rav, featuring Cantor Barbara Ostfeld.

I want to move on to a different time in your life after the pulpit where you started working for the Placement Commission. 

Our professional organization is the American Conference of Cantors, and it exists to support cantors in their work, in their ongoing education, in their outreach, and in their connection to the Union for Reform Judaism and its social action projects. And it also offers placement services to ordained cantors. There has always been a placement director who sort of runs the audition and interview process. I took up that role after I retired from my last pulpit position. And it was an exalted form of matchmaking. I worked with congregations to find out what their mission was and how they identified themselves. Then they then were prepared to choose from among the candidates which cantor would mesh with their rabbinic team's values and the role that they play in the community. It was very complicated and very nuanced, but very gratifying. 

What kinds of music do you like singing today? 

There are many women cantors who are also composers, and some of their music is just perfectly matched to the inner workings of a female cantor. I love the music of Salomone Rossi. His psalm settings are ethereal. I love Ben Steinberg, whose cantata, The Crown of Torah, has moved me.

Could you reflect a bit on Jewish women: why it took such a long time to protest the locking up of our voices? Who held the key? Why did this take until the late 20th century? 

Cantor Ostfeld officiating a bat mitzvah with Rabbi Jerome Davidson (left) and Rabbi Deborah Hirsch (right) at Temple Beth-El of Great Neck in 1981.

The emergence of women as full Jews began with the Enlightenment, but it wasn't really until the second wave of feminism, the Betty Friedan era, when women realized that they'd been playing bit parts, walk-on roles in Jewish life, and that their singing voices had been held behind bars. So there was a kind of a din torah, a litigation brought, not against the Eternal One, but against the patriarchy, because it was male-written laws that kept us down. Nothing that was divine in origin. It was human in origin, and we needed to fight it and relegate it to the ash heap of history. I mean, for millennia, Jewish prayer was only heard in a two-octave range, and there was plenty of majesty in that range and great beauty, but there was no silver. It was missing two octaves of the human voice. Prayer is nothing but the creation of art from the human voice, anything from a growl to a cry for help, to songs of praise, and to reflective pieces that reach inward. All of those expressions happened in every key, and it was a very glaring shame that our sound had been behind bars for so long. 

Now that women are accepted in the synagogue and the cantorate, I'm curious about the process of getting materials to sing. Not every piece of music, even if you moved it to a higher key, works for the different voices. 

For the most part, getting materials to sing has not been a big issue because a soprano will sing liturgical music in the treble clef, just as a tenor would, and a mezzo soprano or an alto will sing the baritone range. It's just a question of where those notes happen in their vocal apparatus. Speaking roughly, that part was not difficult, but as women entered full-fledged Jewish life, the liturgy began to reflect that in many ways. The way Torah was taught changed to include the silenced voices of women. Therefore, compositions had to be written for the female cantor, and many have been written by female cantors. That does bring out a certain fittingness to some liturgical texts. Because if a piece is composed by a woman, meant to be sung by a woman, and then is sung by a woman, and she has on her coattails, all the women who ever were silenced, that's a powerful, a powerful thing.

We basically broke down the barricades surrounding the barricades that had shut us out. And as the barriers fell, liturgy began to be thought of differently. And in the cases where women's rituals were not celebrated, clearly, in Judaism previously—the occasion on which a young girl enters puberty, the rituals of childbirth, what it is to nurture a family—all those women-centered moments that needed to be made sacred through ritual and through text. And the body of Jewish wisdom needed to be re-examined through other lenses than a man's. And it only opened up and it was really the flowering then of Jewish liturgy and of Torah study that could not have come about without the entrance of women—the loud entrance of women into Jewish life—and the changing of the perspective that Judaism is a man's religion seen through the lens of masculinity.

What would be one of the things or something that you would like a young person to know about life as a female cantor? 

Cantor Ostfeld receives the Debbie Friedman Award at the 2019 URJ Biennial.

The most important thing that I have to say about life as a female cantor is that female cantors should realize that in every prayer they chant, in every prayer they sing, there is an element of the celebration of enlightenment. And every time we sing, we are celebrating that, the results of the enlightenment, which are so many and so great. And so it's just inherent in the beast. And the thing I would say to young cantors is, the big deal is connecting the dots. You connect your voice to the Jewish community, to Torah study, to social action, to mindfulness, and to the greening of the Earth. Our voices are tools; and we call attention by singing out with them. And the more our voice can connect to the basic efforts and movements of our time, the more impact we can have. So it's about connection, and it's about rejoicing in the enlightenment that freed us, and LGBTQ+ people, and others who have hitherto been either unseen in Jewish life or cast out by Jewish life. 

Could you comment on what you feel your legacy is or what you would wish it to be as the first woman ordained as a cantor in the U.S.?

Well, women cantors are doing the proverbial singing of a new song. And on our coattails are all the other outcasts who've been marginalized, who now come with us into main roles in Jewish life. And we've added half of the human voice back into the liturgy, back into the study of Torah, and back into the way the messages resonate. And the Eternal One always heard voices in our range, and always heard the cries of the outcast. But the patriarchy didn't. And so this is a great vision of a Torah scroll that not only unrolls, but stretches. And we're in the beginning of the stretching, a new stretching of the Torah scroll. 

This interview is part of our Voices of Change: 50 Years of Women in the American Cantorate Series:

Read More About the Series