Mordecai (Markus) Sandberg (Hebrew: מרדכי זנדברג) (February 4, 1897 – December 28, 1973) was a composer and physician.
[1] He was a creative and prolific composer, a musical theorist, and an innovative physician in the area of alternative and natural medicine in 1920s and 1930s Jerusalem.
[6] Sandberg was born in the town of Hârlău but grew up in Suceava in Bukovina, a province of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire.
It was during this time that he began his earliest surviving creative work, Demosthenes, a play and later an overture which was completed in 1925.
After World War I, Austria ended its control over the city of Suceava, and in 1922 Sandberg moved to Jerusalem in the British Mandate of Palestine.
As part of his practice of medicine he authored The Way of Spiritual Healing according to the Jewish Tradition (1939), a book published in Hebrew.
While working as a medical doctor in Palestine, Sandberg’s pursued his passion for music and he was active as a composer.
[2] In the same year, he organized concerts for his own works and that of German composer Willi von Moellendorff in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv; he lectured on the quarter tone system in Palestinian music in Tel-Aviv and offered courses in ear training to performers and composers.
Over the next twenty years, Sandberg devoted his time to composing musical settings for the entire Bible.
In 1970, he moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada,[9] where he obtained a position as a teaching fellow at Stong College, York University.