Max Helfman

Max Helfman (, 1901–1963) was a Polish-born American Jewish composer, choral conductor, pianist, singer, and educator. He had a long career arranging both secular and religious Jewish music and was considered to have a gift for writing music that was both singable and emotionally complex, which was modern and original and yet rooted in traditional folk and synagogue melodies.

Among his best known works are his (1942), a Sabbath Cantata, and his (1948), a Yiddish-language Cantata about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He directed many choirs and educational institutes on both the east and west coasts, most famously the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in California for seventeen years; his influence is most strongly felt on the religious music of Reform Judaism. He was also well known for socialist and pro-Zionist causes and affiliations. His mother was named Eva Daniels and his father Nathan Helfman taught and led a choir as well as working as a mohel and hazzan. Max sang in his father's choir from a young age and was already noticed for his excellent singing voice. He graduated from high school in 1918 with a music award that gave him a scholarship at the Mannes School of Music in New York. In April 1926 he married his wife Florence, a fellow pianist.

Music career In the mid-1920s, Helfman attempted to make a name for himself as a composer, and also worked as an organist and choir director at various places in New York and New Jersey. Although his training was in Classical music, Helfman mainly dedicated himself to both Secular and religious Jewish music. When booked for a large event he would sometimes bring multiple choirs together to sing with four or five hundred voices. He also directed a 400 person choir in the Temple of Religion at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Helfman hed leadership roles in a number of Synagogues over his life, and also held regular roles leading High Holy Days services at others. He was also director at Temple B'Nai Abraham in Newark, New Jersey, a Conservative synagogue which placed a great emphasis on music, and developed its choir into a very technically advanced one. His collaboration with cantor Abraham Shapiro at B'Nai Abraham was also important to his musical development. It has remained one of his most popular pieces which has become part of the regular Synagogue repertoire in many places in the United States. This new role marked a turn away from Yiddish-language music drawing on Eastern European themes and an increased focus on Israeli music and Zionist ideals. Helfman arrived with a firm belief that American Jewish youth had lost their passion for Jewish musical culture and soon built a large circle of teachers and students around him. He continued to compose during this period; in 1948 he conducted the premiere of one of his better-known Yiddish-language works, , a Cantata about the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He soon began to work for the University of Judaism which had some overlap in faculty with the Brandeis Camp; he had long dreamed of opening a Jewish school of arts and he saw this new institution as a likely place to do so. In 1948–9 with the founding of the State of Israel, a new summer art institute studying its music was established at the Brandeis camp, with Helfman as director. However, that art institute only lasted until 1952.

Helfman died of a heart attack while visiting Dallas, Texas on August 9, 1963.