By Jon Marks
Growing up in Mt. Airy, Arlyne Unger’s mother, Kitty, always loved hearing her daughter sing, especially at family functions.
“They’d have those big family seders and would make me sing Ma Nishtana and Dayenu,” Unger said. “So, I learned at a fairly young age to be comfortable in front of an audience singing my Jewish music.”
The problem back then was she wasn’t allowed to do it on the bimah in shul.
“There were certain things I couldn’t sing because I was a girl,” said the woman now known as Hazzan Unger at Darchei Noam in Ambler. “It was just taken for granted, for girls, Friday night was their bat mitzvah and boys on Saturday. I accepted it, but not happily. I felt very limited in what I was allowed to lead. It also bothered me the day after my bat mitzvah I came to services and wasn’t allowed to lead anything extra. A boy having a bar mitzvah was allowed to lead the Musaf service. I couldn’t chant Torah or Haftorah. Just a few prayers. In the back of my mind I always felt cheated of something I loved and knew I could do well.”
The itch stayed with her through high school (Plymouth Whitemarsh) and college (Penn), where Unger studied romance languages and prepared to become a teacher. Having also attended Gratz College, she was able to teach Hebrew school and tutor on the side.
By then, the old rules had loosened, and she was permitted to read Torah and do other things previously forbidden for girls. But the idea of doing it professionally never really entered her mind.
“It just wasn’t done,” said the former Arlyne Handel, who married Ron Unger — whom she first met while on a trip to Israel as a teenager before both attended Penn — while she was finishing up getting her master’s degree in education. “I figured I was going to be a foreign language teacher and teach Hebrew on the side because that was the path open to me. By the time women were starting to become cantors, I was pretty set in my secular career.”
That began to change in 1989, when the bar mitzvah boy she was tutoring, Eric Goldberg, froze on the bimah. “He got through his blessings and Torah reading and started doing the blessing for the Haftorah and got mixed up,” she explained. “He started doing the Torah blessing and the wrong melody. When he realized it he started to cry. There was dead silence and he didn’t know what to do. The rabbi and the cantor didn’t move.”
Eric’s mother picks up the story from here.
“Eric was doing fine,” said Andrea Goldberg, who has remained friends with Unger over the years. “Then all of a sudden he stood there and froze. Arlyne came over to me and said, ‘Do you want me to help him?’ I said, ‘I would love it.’ She went up, stood behind him and reassured him it was OK. Then he started reading again and finished off very nicely.”
That moment made Unger realize she could do more with her life than teach.
“I just had one of those lightbulb moments,” said the cantor, who had already begun raising her family with her son Michael and daughter Rebecca. “Like why couldn’t I ever have been a cantor? It struck me maybe there’s more to being a cantor than having a beautiful voice.
You need to have connections with people and feel it in your soul. I went to the Israel parade after that and Gratz had a table and was giving out information about master’s degrees. One was a master’s in Jewish music and cantorial studies. I was talking to someone and asked, ‘Is this something I could do? Secular teaching was not reaching my soul, and this was something I dreamed of. But can I actually do it? She said, ‘Yes. You can make a living from it.’”
That put the wheels in motion, which certainly skidded a few times before Unger completed the two-year program and became a certified cantor. Along the way, she got a part-time job as educational director at Beth Tikvah B’Nai Jeshurun in Erdenheim, eventually becoming hazzan in 1995, making her the first female cantor/educator in the Delaware Valley.
Fast forward 30 years and she’s made a home at Darchei Noam, following her 20-year stint at BTBJ, along with a few other stops.
“I hope this is the end of my professional journey,” said Unger, who prefers being called hazzan rather than cantor. “Darchei Noam is open, with no judgment. They accept me at this point of my life. I have a chance with Rabbi Danielle to experiment and try new things. This feels like the right opportunity for me.”
The feeling is mutual. “It’s been a wonderful experience,” said Darchei Noam Rabbi Danielle Parmenter, who can relate to her colleague in many ways. “We balance each other’s work. She’s more traditional and able to meet needs of a diverse community. I take it for granted not having to face the stuff she did as a I dreamed of being a rabbi. But she’s inspiring, absolutely brilliant, and I love to see her stand in that light and see herself in my eyes and know what a rock star and trailblazer she’s been.”
Unger wants other women to follow her trail.
“It’s absolutely time for women’s voices to be heard,” the cantor said. “I just think it enriches the Jewish people. Now younger congregants take it for granted because women have active parts in services. I remember at one point we had a sweet young man whose family moved and changed synagogues. At that time the synagogue had a male cantor and he said, ‘I didn’t know men could be cantors.’ I love that they take for granted we’re equal to men in our Jewish journeys and participation in synagogue.”
Jon Marks is a Philadelphia-area freelance writer.