Thursday, June 13, 2019
Velvel Pasternak, Preserver of Hasidic Music, Is Dead at 85
Velvel Pasternak, a leading publisher of Jewish music who recorded and transcribed, and thus preserved, the singular melodies that had typically been passed along by tradition within Hasidic sects, died on Tuesday in Oceanside, N.Y. He was 85.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Gedalia, who said his father had had a cardiac arrest in May and never recovered.
What Alan Lomax did for folk music by traveling the country to record locally cherished but obscure ballads and blues that were in danger of extinction, Mr. Pasternak did for Hasidic music, though on a smaller scale. Working out of his Long Island home, tape recorder in hand, he drove to the Borough Park and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn, which have large Hasidic populations, and recorded the mostly unnotated music of the Modzitz, Lubavitch, Bobov and Ger dynastic groups. The works were incorporated in his first book, “Songs of the Chassidim,” published in 1968.
The next year, Mr. Pasternak took a sabbatical from teaching at local day schools and flew with his family to Israel, where he visited Hasidic enclaves like Bnei Brak and recorded another batch of songs that had never been published, his daughters Shira Pasternak Be’eri and Naava Pasternak Swirsky said. The music was published as “Songs of the Chassidim II.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/arts/music/velvel-pasternak-dead.html
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Gedalia, who said his father had had a cardiac arrest in May and never recovered.
What Alan Lomax did for folk music by traveling the country to record locally cherished but obscure ballads and blues that were in danger of extinction, Mr. Pasternak did for Hasidic music, though on a smaller scale. Working out of his Long Island home, tape recorder in hand, he drove to the Borough Park and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn, which have large Hasidic populations, and recorded the mostly unnotated music of the Modzitz, Lubavitch, Bobov and Ger dynastic groups. The works were incorporated in his first book, “Songs of the Chassidim,” published in 1968.
The next year, Mr. Pasternak took a sabbatical from teaching at local day schools and flew with his family to Israel, where he visited Hasidic enclaves like Bnei Brak and recorded another batch of songs that had never been published, his daughters Shira Pasternak Be’eri and Naava Pasternak Swirsky said. The music was published as “Songs of the Chassidim II.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/arts/music/velvel-pasternak-dead.html
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