David Nowakowsky

Along with several contemporaries, Nowakowsky integrated traditional Jewish liturgical modes with western harmonies and styles, reinvigorating music for the synagogue.

At 8 he left home, apparently due to the hounding of his stepmother,[1] to sing in a trio with a cantor in the nearby town of Khmilnyk.

He also studied traditional Jewish liturgical modes with cantor Yerucham (HaKaton) Blindman, and organ, theory and counterpoint at the Conservatory in Berdychiv.

[1] Nowakowsky followed this concept but used Hebrew instead, adapting Felix Mendelssohn's Opus 91 setting of Psalm 98 for his chorus.

In 1939 Sophia's husband, Boris, was able to obtain Romanian passports for the family, and they moved to the French village of Collonges-sous-Salève on the Swiss border just outside Geneva, taking Nowakowsky's papers with them.

Boris first managed to save the works by burying them at a farm near Archamps, La Ferme Chosal.

[5] The collection was brought to the US in 1952 when Alexandre won a scholarship to Columbia University,[4] and found a permanent home in the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music in New York in 1955.