A Cantor Sherman Will Sing Prayers In Warsaw Again: Why Timing Matters

DELRAY BEACH, FL — Seventh-generation cantor Glenn Sherman plans to put an asterisk on his family’s story late this summer in Warsaw, Poland, whose haunted grounds are indelibly stained with the blood of millions of Jews.

The 67-year-old Delray Beach man would rather be almost anywhere else than Warsaw on Sept. 9-10, though.

But in going there, Sherman will fulfill an unspoken promise to his ancestral cantors, who sang prayers during Poland’s 1,000-year Jewish history. He traces his own family tree to 1764 Staszow, Poland.

“It’s not something I want to do,” Sherman told Patch. “It’s something I think is necessary.”

When he was 10, Sherman’s father was spirited out of Warsaw, before Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power but at an increasingly dangerous time for Jews in Poland. Sherman’s grandfather settled in Toronto in 1922 as cantor of the Polisha Shul, and each of his sons became cantors in the United States.

As the cantor at the world’s largest synagogue, the Great Synagogue in Tlomackie Street, Sherman’s great-uncle, Pinchas Szirman (Szirman is the Polish spelling of Sherman), had the connections to get out, but “never left his people,” Sherman said.

In his last letter in July 1939, Szirman wrote:

“We are all filled with anxiety about our future. Who knows what is in store for us from the enemy Hitler (may his name be blotted out).”

The elaborate Tlomackie Street synagogue was blown up on May 16, 1943, by SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, who Sherman said “took great pleasure” in destroying the edifice as part of a campaign known as “Operation Harvest,” intended to quell uprisings in the Warsaw, Bialystok, and Vilna ghettos.

At the same time, Szirman and his family were taken to the Majdanek concentration camp and killed along with 42,000 other Jews.

Sherman said his father, who died a decade ago at age 93, “never wanted to go back” to Warsaw.

“He said it was soaked in Jewish blood, and I agreed,” he said. “But the story has to be told. I am a cantor. I have to change the ending of the Sherman family in Poland.”

Unthinkable: ‘Unsafe In A Synagogue’

Eight decades have passed since a Sherman family cantor sang the prayers in Warsaw.

Repairing the link in the family’s cantorial chain is important on its own, Sherman said, but a troubling series of events in the United States and abroad add urgency to his pilgrimage, including a striking global increase in antisemitism.

“I was singing in the synagogue when my phone went off about the Tree of Life shooting,” Sherman said of the 2018 alert that a gunman had opened fire at the Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11.

“I never thought of being unsafe in a synagogue until that happened. Things were horrible with antisemitism in Europe,” he said, but told himself, “it couldn’t happen in this country.”

It can happen, it has happened and it is happening. Antisemitism has been simmering in the United States for years.

As a kid growing up in New York City, Sherman and other kids were uncomfortable wearing their yarmulke because it “showed your Jewishness, and you could be picked out at any time and be bullied,” he said.

“It still takes guts [to wear a yarmulke in public]. You could be shot anywhere, anytime — in a school, at a store in Buffalo — which is truly strange, because this is not who we are.”

Sherman's optimism shines eternally. Increasingly, extremist factions are sending the opposite message, though.

Antisemitic acts, especially those involving assault, occurred at record levels in the United States last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Killings by domestic extremists are up, too, fueled by conspiracy theories, misogyny and anti-vaccine sentiment, according to another ADL report earlier this year.

All of that pushes Sherman closer to Poland, where he will be separated by an arbitrary border from the firebombed ruins of Russia’s war of imperialism in Ukraine, a chilling parallel to Hitler’s war to expel the Jews from Europe eight decades before.

'America Is The Shining Light'

It’s important for the Florida cantor to go to Warsaw as an American, even as domestic extremism roils on multiple fronts.

“This is the greatest country in the world. It is,” Sherman emphasized, repeating, “My grandfather, when he came to Toronto, wanted America. It is the greatest country in the world. But we have some issues. Extremism is everywhere — it’s not just Jews."

Still, “America is the shining light,” he said, the world's greatest weapon against antisemitism and hate of all kinds.

The upcoming pilgrimage is Sherman's iteration of the March of the Living, a commitment to keep alive the individual stories of the Holocaust. Every year, Jewish youth from around the world come together in Poland and march to the sites of former concentration camps and take part in other events to keep alive the stories of the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Only about 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”

Sherman doesn’t plan to go to a concentration camp.

Instead, the seventh-generation cantor will lead Shabbat services on Sept. 10 at the historic Nozyk synagogue, the only of some 400 Jewish houses of prayer that survived the Holocaust. Originally built from 1898-1902, its damaged structure was rebuilt from 1977-1983.

Despite the trepidation of going to a place where millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing an oppressor seem to bring the past forward again, Sherman is excited to stand on the soil where, for a millennium, many of his ancestors lived and died.

To them, he will make a promise to never allow anyone — a dictator, an agent of extremism, anyone — to break the familial cantorial chain.

And he when he does, he will be able to add the footnote to his family’s history:

* A Cantor Sherman sang the prayers in Warsaw again.

Who Is Cantor Glenn Sherman?

A graduate of Yeshiva of Central Queens and Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, Sherman was president of Bachurei Chemed in Long Beach, New York, and served as cantor at several temples in Florida.

He has officiated at hundreds of simchas (happy occasions) and managed destination bar/bat mitzvahs and weddings on scores of cruise ships, Caribbean islands and in foreign countries.

In Florida, Sherman has served as cantor at Temple Beth David, Palm Beach Gardens; Temple Emanuel, Palm Beach; and Century Pines Jewish Center, Pembroke Pines.