From the Holy Blossom Archives Committee

Refugee Musician: A Simple Question Reveals an Inspiring Story

By Susan Cohen, Holy Blossom Temple Archives

Sometimes a simple outside query to the Holy Blossom Archives leads us to information that expands our understanding of the synagogue’s personnel and their role in Toronto.

So it was with a request last year from a University of Toronto student working on a musical database of émigré musicians who influenced Canadian musical life. She asked us what we knew about a German organist named Erich Schaeffer who was hired at Holy Blossom in 1938.

The name was not familiar to us, so we started on a hunt through our archival collection and gradually built up a picture of Erich Schaeffer.  First, his name was listed in the commemoration booklet for the opening of our synagogue on Bathurst Street in May 1938.  Erich Schaeffer was both the organist and choir conductor for that splendid weekend in the presence of the Governor-General.  From the repertoire he assembled for that occasion, it was clear that he was an experienced musician with a knowledge of the grand classical repertoire and the masterpieces of the German Jewish Reform tradition.

Then we searched through our Board minutes from 1938 and found reference to him in March, just a few months before the opening. A Board member had gone to New York to interview him for the position of organist and to bring him to Toronto. In doing outside research, we found his name under a special federal government program that brought some talented German and Austrian musicians to Canada in the late 1930s.

The synagogue’s minutes tell us that Holy Blossom not only paid him as organist and music director but helped establish him and his family in the city.  A spring bulletin from 1938 introduces him to the congregation as “a most eminent German-Jewish organist” who had served for over 11 years at the New Synagogue in Breslau Germany. The bulletin encourages congregants to employ him as a teacher.

Erich Schaeffer and his family left Germany just in time. The rabbi of the New Synagogue recommended him to us as a distinguished soloist with a masterful technique on the organ and a “thorough musical education, especially in the field of Hebraic tradition and liturgy.” German Jewish histories tell us that Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) was the third largest Jewish community in Germany, that the New Synagogue was an architectural masterpiece (the second largest synagogue in the country), that the synagogue was burned to the ground in Kristallnacht, and that the very last rabbi there died in a concentration camp.

Erich Schaeffer brought more than the classical tradition to Toronto. He stayed at Holy Blossom until 1955, cementing the synagogue’s reputation for musical excellence. Newspapers tell us he taught students at various places and showed his versatility by playing for more than a decade in the Hans Kaufman Trio at prominent supper clubs in the city. As the organist of Holy Blossom, he gave concerts at important venues and of course offered his services to bridal couples at the synagogue. In a special concert for the Toronto Star, he tried to expand Toronto’s knowledge about Jewish musical traditions and their influence on music in general.  Fred Schaeffer, his son, just 7 when he came to Toronto, passed away 18 months ago; he built up a thriving engineering practice in the city and became an established collector of Canadian art. His obituary acknowledges the family’s start at Holy Blossom.

(The Archives Committee receives inquiries regularly. We invite you to contact us about this or other areas of interest at:  archives@holyblossom.org.   We are always interested in learning and sharing more about our remarkable history.  We also encourage you to examine the archival displays in the Schwartz-Reisman Atrium.)