TAUBE, SAMUEL BARUCH

TAUBE, SAMUEL BARUCH (1914– ), ḥazzan. Taube was born in Zelov, near Lodz in Poland. His family moved to Austria when he was a child. In Vienna he studied cantorial liturgy and music; among his teachers was the cantor Emmanuel Frenkel. His first cantorial position was in the Montefiore Synagogue in Vienna. He then went to Paris, where he held the position of cantor in the Synagogue de la Rue Montevideo. During World War II he was deported to a concentration camp, but his talents saved him. After the war he served as cantor to the Jewish community of Goeteberg in Sweden. He held cantorial positions in London from 1947 until 1958 when he moved to Washington, to the Beth Sholom Synagogue. In 1963 Taube moved to Montreal, Canada, where he was cantor to the Beth Orah Congregation until 1975, when he moved to Israel, where he trained cantors. For over a decade, he was also a faculty member of the Tel Aviv Cantorial Institute. He made recordings of cantorial music available through Musique Internationale Chicago. The hundreds of cantorial recitatives that Taube has transcribed over the decades are models of perfection in this art. (Akiva Zimmerman / Raymond Goldstein (2nd ed.)