Andrew Silow-Carroll | Jewish News

Letting go: Jews retire yellow ribbons, dog tags, and other hostage symbols with gratitude and grief

Andrew Silow-Carroll — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:51:50 +0000

(JTA) — Like most synagogues, Congregation Beth El in South Orange, New Jersey added new rituals after the Oct. 7,
2023 attacks that killed 1,200 in Israel, saw another 251 taken hostage, and launched a grinding war between Israel and Hamas.

The Conservative congregation hung a “Bring Them Home Now” sign out front on behalf of the hostages. Rabbi Jesse Olitzky added the Acheinu prayer for redeeming captives to the weekly Shabbat service, and each week read the biography of a hostage. As the war raged on, the congregation sang songs of peace.

At Ohef Sholom Temple in Norfolk, the congregation sang the Mi Chamocha prayer to the tune of Hatikvah.

There and elsewhere, congregants wore yellow hostage ribbons and pins on their lapels, and dog tags with the names of the missing. Some families lit extra candles on Shabbat. Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh would eventually be listed among the dead in Gaza, popularized the wearing of a piece of masking tape on which she wrote the number of days since the hostages were taken.

Now, as the last 20 living hostages were returned to Israel as part of a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, many Jews are relieved to be ending these rituals — even as they question whether it is right to do so and wonder how to channel their prayers and practices toward whatever comes next. Deceased hostages are still believed to be in Gaza, and even as soldiers return home and Gazans reclaim what’s left of their former lives, an enduring peace seems far away.

At Beth El, the Acheinu and lawn sign will stay in place until all the bodies are returned. In the meantime, at the celebration of Simchat Torah, there was a chance to experience a sense of relief members haven’t felt in two years.

“Like so many we haven’t been able as a people to move forward and get to Oct. 8 until the hostages came home,” Olitzky says, hours after Hamas released the living hostages. “And now there is a sense of being able to exhale and breathe and, God willing, to move forward, to rebuild, and for all Israeli citizens and for Palestinians to have opportunities to build peace.”

When Israeli pop star Yoni Bloch made a video in January imagining an end to the war and showing Israelis pulling down “Bring Them Home” posters and cutting yellow ribbons off their car doors, the idea seemed to many too distant to believe. Now, rabbis and Jews in the pews are asking if it is time to move forward.

Rabbi Yael Ridberg, the recently retired spiritual leader of Congregation Dor Hadash in San Diego, says she would remove the ribbon and dog tag she wears when the bodies of the deceased hostages are returned.

“I look forward to tucking them away, but not disposing of them,” she wrote in response to a journalist’s query. “I will stop wearing them when all the deceased hostages are returned. These are keepsakes of a time worth remembering, as hard as it has been for the last two years.”

Ronit Wolff Hanan, the former music director at Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey, says she is not sure what to do with the ribbon pin and dog tags she’s worn for most of the past two years. She’s torn between “this unbelievable release and relief and joy,” and sadness about the 24 bodies yet to be returned.

“My whole thing is, well, what do we do now?” says Wolff Hanan, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen whose son served more than 300 days in the Israeli reserves during the war. “I keep thinking about the long, difficult road all of these hostages and families have ahead of them, and it’s just unimaginable. But also I’m thinking about, when is it really over? We don’t know if this is the dawn of a new era or if we are going to go back to the same old, same old.”

On a Facebook page for Jewish women, a number of members spoke of their reluctance to stop lighting extra candles. Some felt that if they did, it would break a kind of spiritual commitment or might suggest that they’ve given up on the freed hostages who will continue to have mental and physical challenges. Some referred to a passage from Talmud (Shabbat 21b) that extends the metaphor of the Hanukkah candles to suggest that someone should always add light, not subtract.

By contrast, the comic Periel Aschenbrand wrote that she was eager to take off the button that she’d been wearing in solidarity with Omri Miran, a hostage abducted in front of his wife and two children on Oct. 7. “I can’t wait to be able to take it off tomorrow, and for Omri to be reunited with his daughters and family,” she wrote Sunday, Oct. 12 on Instagram.

Alyssa Goldwater, an Orthodox influencer, wrote that she too is “really looking forward” to taking off the yellow ribbon pin she’s worn over the past two years, but that removing doesn’t mean forgetting.

“When you remove a pin, the tiny holes never fully go away,” she wrote on Instagram. “They will remain and serve as a reminder that we will never forget what has happened to us over the last two years. We will never forget who stood by us and who stood soundly or against us. The holes will be tiny because we pray that the hostages will be able to eventually heal and live their regular lives again, where the unimaginable travesties they’ve been through won’t even be noticeable in the human eye, but the holes will remain, because this is a part of us now.”

Long before Oct. 7 led to a torrent of new practices, Jews altered their prayers and rituals in tune with current events, with some changes handed down from rabbis and others bubbling up from the “folk.”

Some changes stick — like the Av HaRachamim memorial prayer, composed in the Middle Ages for those who perished in the Crusades — and others fall away. In the 1970s and ’80s, boys and girls celebrating their b’nai mitzvah “twinned” with Soviet Jews unable to emigrate. Adults wore silver bracelets with the name of these refuseniks and put them away when the emigration restrictions fell.

The additions and changes that persist usually speak to other events, the way Av HaRachamim has become a weekly reminder of various Jewish tragedies. In general, however, a prayer or ritual that responds to current events “should have a theoretical timestamp for when it exits stage left, even if we cannot always know when that time will come,” Rabbi Ethan Tucker, president and rosh yeshiva of Hadar, explained in a Facebook post discussing the transition away from Oct. 7 practices. “Without that foresight and planning, the addition either straggles on, eventually becoming a kind of exhibit in the gallery of prayer, or it simply fades away when monotony and detachment have gotten the better of it.”

The Jewish calendar itself seemed to conspire in the spiritual turbulence of many Jews: The hostage release came on the eve of Israelis’ celebration of Simchat Torah — and the second anniversary, on the Hebrew calendar, of the Hamas attacks.

The holiday is meant to be a day of unbridled joy. A centerpiece of Simchat Torah is the hakafah, when congregants dance with and around the Torah scrolls.

Last year, congregations struggled with how to match the happy themes of the holiday with the one-year anniversary of the worst attack in Israel’s history. Olitzky said his congregation began last year’s Simchat Torah festivities with a “solemn” hakafah, where congregants sang Israel’s national anthem and a somber Hebrew song while standing still. Olitzky said he took solace at the time in the words of Goldberg-Polin, who said, “‘There is a time to sob and a time to dance’ and we have to do both right now.”

And while the release of the hostages is also tinged with sadness — for the lost years, the captives who didn’t make it, the suffering still to come — many will use the holiday as a celebration of deliverance and gratitude.

Adat Shalom, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Bethesda, Maryland, used Simchat Torah to celebrate the hostages’ return by ending another common practice since Oct. 7: a chair left empty on the synagogue’s bima, featuring the image of a missing hostage.

During the dancing on Simchat Torah, the congregation brought the chair and used it to lift up members wedding-style. “We have a lot of people in the community who are really close with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Washington,” says Rabbi Scott Perlo.

Adat Shalom rotated in a number of special prayers and readings over the past two years, acknowledging, Perlo says ruefully, that “there’s so much to pray for,” including “the hostages, the safety of our family in Israel, the safety of people in Gaza,” and the state of American democracy.

He understands that some congregants may be wary of letting go of the new rites and prayers — perhaps afraid that if they don’t keep up the tradition, the horrors that prompted their prayers will only return.

“So what I would say to them is some version of, ‘Yes, don’t let it go completely, but let it transform into something new,’” says Perlo.

Rabbi Felipe Goodman of Temple Beth Sholom in Las Vegas, Nevada planned to incorporate a ritual of release and transformation during Simchat Torah celebrations. He asked congregants to bring their yellow pins and dog tags and place them on an heirloom Torah cover. “This cover will be dedicated as a memorial and displayed at the entrance of our Temple, so that every time we walk through Our Temple’s doors, we will remember what happened on Oct. 7, 2023,” he wrote in a message to members.

With the release of the living hostages fulfilling two years of prayers, gestures and vigils, many offered new words and actions to mark the transition from war to whatever follows in its place. Hanna Yerushalmi, a rabbi based in Annapolis, Maryland, shared a poem on Instagram, called “Yellow Chairs,” that welcomed the transformation of the fraught symbols of Oct. 7 grief and remembrance. It reads in part:

Empty chairs will be

saved for friends arriving late,

and tape will be

tape again,

and hostage necklaces

will be put away, forgotten in drawers.

and Saturday night will be date night once again.

Pope Francis, who advanced church’s relationships with Jews

Andrew Silow-Carroll — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:12:59 +0000

(JTA) — Pope Francis, who significantly advanced the Catholic Church’s relationship with Jews by actively promoting dialogue, reconciliation, and a strong stance against antisemitism — relations that were tested after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war — died Monday, April 21, one day after marking Easter with a public appearance in the Vatican. He was 88.

Francis suffered multiple health conditions in recent years and had been hospitalized for several weeks in February with what the Vatican called a “complex clinical picture.”

But Francis had rebounded to make public appearances and, on Sunday, April 20, met privately with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism whom he had indirectly rebuked before his hospitalization for citing Catholic doctrine in defending the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

The first Jesuit and first Latin American to serve as pope, Francis assumed the leadership of the Catholic Church in 2013 after years of building and sustaining Jewish relationships in his native Argentina. In 2010, he co-wrote, with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, On Heaven and Earth, a book based on their public conversations on differences and similarities between Judaism and Catholicism.

Francis met frequently with Jewish leaders and paid a state visit to Israel in 2014. He often invoked the spirit of Nostra Aetate, promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of Vatican II, which repudiated centuries of anti-Jewish theology and inaugurated a new era in Catholic-Jewish relations. He controversially restricted the Latin Mass, a symbol of the pre-Vatican II church whose liturgy includes a call for the conversion of the Jews.

Francis reiterated the spirit of Nostra Aetate in 2013, speaking to the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations. “Due to our common roots, a Christian cannot be anti-Semitic!” the pope declared, before going on to describe his warm relations with Jewish clergy in his native Argentina.

“I had the joy of maintaining relations of sincere friendship with leaders of the Jewish world,” said Francis. “We talked often of our respective religious identities, the image of man found in the Scriptures, and how to keep an awareness of God alive in a world now secularized in many ways. … But above all, as friends, we enjoyed each other’s company, we were all enriched through encounter and dialogue, and we welcomed each other, and this helped all of us grow as people and as believers.”

Such statements sustained a relationship sometimes strained when Francis adopted positions at odds with the core concerns of many Jews. In May 2015, an expansion of Vatican relations with Palestinian leadership following the Palestinians’ unilateral pursuit of statehood drew criticism from Israeli and Jewish leaders, who at the time viewed direct negotiations with Israel as the only credible path to peace.

Francis also strongly defended the record of Pope Pius XII, who served during the Holocaust. Critics accuse Pius of having turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering in the Shoah, while the Vatican has long maintained he worked behind the scenes to save Jews. In 2019, Jewish groups welcomed Francis’s announcement that the Vatican Archives covering the Pius papacy would open to researchers beginning in March 2020.

For scholars such as David Kertzer, who has written books about the Vatican during World War II, the newly available material only confirmed the impression that Pius, despite his personal objections to Hitler and Nazism and occasionally valiant attempts to protect Italy’s Jews, was more concerned with protecting the church and its future under fascism.

The Israel-Hamas war, which followed the deadly Hamas attacks in Israel in Oct. 7, 2023, further strained relations between Francis, the Jews, and Israelis. In November 2024, citing experts saying, “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis called for the charge — which Israel strenuously rejects — to be “carefully investigated.”

In December, Francis attended the inauguration of a nativity scene at the Vatican that positioned baby Jesus on a keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf — a nod to activists who have identified Jesus, a Jew born in Roman times, as a Palestinian. Both incidents drew outcry from Jewish groups, and the nativity scene was removed.

Defenders of the pope said his statements about the Israel-Hamas war were in keeping with Catholic doctrine on the value of peace and human life, and did not reflect on Francis’s commitment to fighting antisemitism. He also repeatedly called for the release of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Indeed, a document issued last December by the American Jewish Committee, “Translate Hate,” included Catholic commentaries written, with the pope’s blessing, by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. The commentaries endorsed key post-Vatican II doctrine on teaching about Judaism and respecting the Jews’ deep religious connection towards Israel.

Despite the disagreements, Francis maintained warm relations with Jewish leaders involved in interfaith dialogue.

“I sorrowfully mourn the death of Pope Francis, a towering figure in our time whose leadership, compassion, and dedication to peace transcended religious boundaries,” said Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who received the papal knighthood honor from Francis in New York in 2015.
The following year, Francis made his first appearance at Rome’s Great Synagogue, marking the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate and issuing a joint call with Rome’s chief rabbi against religious violence.

“We are clearly living in a renewed era of Catholic-Jewish relations,” Rabbi Noam Marans, the AJC’s director of interreligious and intergroup relations, wrote in September 2017, on the eve of the pope’s second visit to the United States. “When there are disagreements, they are discussed and often resolved among friends, but even when unresolved, the conversation rarely devolves into a contretemps.”

During that visit, Jewish leaders took part in “Witness for Peace: A Multireligious Gathering with Pope Francis” at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

Jewish groups also appreciated Francis’s frequent pleas to his followers to heed the lessons of the Holocaust. “The memory of the Shoah and its atrocious violence must never be forgotten,” the pope said in 2018 in a message through the Vatican’s secretary of state in Berlin. “It should be a constant warning for all of us of an obligation to reconciliation, of reciprocal comprehension and love toward our ‘elder brothers,’ the Jews.”

In 2017, Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka co-authored an introduction for a book by three Argentine doctors about the Nazi medical experiments. The essay calls the Holocaust a “hell.”

“The human arrogance exposed during the Shoah was the action of people who felt like gods, and shows the aberrant dimension in which we can fall if we forget where we came from and where we are going,” they wrote.

The pope’s friendship with Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinic Seminary, dated to 1997, when the pope, then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, became coadjutor bishop of the Buenos Aires archdiocese. In addition to collaborating in 2010 on their book On Heaven and Earth, the bishop and the rabbi appeared frequently together on Argentinian television.

In a 2013 interview with the New York Jewish Week, Skorka said Francis had a “special relationship towards Jews and Jewishness” and a commitment to Nostra Aetate.

“From a theological point of view, according to what I spoke with him about, he and other important Catholic thinkers believe in cooperation between Jews and Christians in order to get a better world — respecting one another and sharing the challenge to bring more spirituality and justice to the world,” Skorka said.

Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on Dec. 17, 1936 in Buenos Aires. He served as archbishop of the Argentinian capital beginning in 1998 and as cardinal after 2001. In contrast to the often forbidding Benedict XVI, his immediate predecessor as pope, Bergoglio was said to be warm and modest, cooking his own meals and personally answering his phone.

Friendly relations with Jewish clergy was a hallmark of his priesthood. In 2005, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio attended Rosh Hashanah services at the Benei Tikva Slijot synagogue. Bergoglio was the first public personality to sign a petition for justice in the 1994 AMIA bombing case, in which 85 people were killed in a terrorist attack at a Buenos Aires Jewish center. In June 2010, he visited the rebuilt AMIA building to talk with Jewish leaders. In 2024, after years of stalled investigations and charges of a cover-up, an Argentinian court ruled that Iran directed the attack, and that it was carried by Hezbollah.

While he took mostly traditional views on issues like same-sex marriage, Beroglio also had a reputation as a social reformer. Israel Singer, the former head of the World Jewish Congress, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency soon after Francis’s election as pope that he spent time working with Bergoglio when the two were distributing aid to the poor in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, part of a joint Jewish-Catholic program called Tzedaka.

Bergoglio wrote the foreword to a book by Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a Buenos Aires legislator, and in 2012 hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral with Rabbi Alejandro Avruj from the NCI-Emanuel World Masorti congregation.
During that visit, Bergoglio told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”
He was 76 when he was elected to the papacy following the resignation of the German-born Benedict XVI. Francis was the first pope to come from outside Europe in more than a millennium.

He inherited a church wrestling with an array of challenges, including a shortage of priests, a sexual abuse crisis, and difficulties governing the Vatican itself.

In 2018, Francis renewed his commitment to fostering relations between Catholics and Jews and condemning anti-Semitism.

“Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’ disciples,” Francis wrote in “Evangelii Gaudium” (The Joy of the Gospel), described as the flagship document of his papacy. “The friendship which has grown between us makes us bitterly and sincerely regret the terrible persecutions which they have endured, and continue to endure, especially those that have involved Christians.”

Peter Yarrow, Jewish musician and activist of Peter, Paul and Mary fame

Andrew Silow-Carroll — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:33:40 +0000

(JTA) — Peter Yarrow, one-third of the hit-making 1960s folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, and a Jewish activist who promoted Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and other progressive causes, died Tuesday, Jan. 7 at age 86.

The longtime resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side entered hospice last month. The cause of death was bladder cancer.

Yarrow was a Cornell graduate playing in Greenwich Village clubs during the early 1960s folk revival when manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman, who also steered Bob Dylan’s career, suggested he team up with the Kentucky-born singer Mary Travers. Travers in turn proposed they include Paul Stookey.

After polishing their act at clubs in the Village like the Bitter End and the Gaslight, the trio signed with Warner and went on to record a series of hits, including folk standards like Lemon Tree and 500 Miles, and compositions by other revivalists, including Pete Seeger’s If I Had a Hammer, and Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.

Their debut album, Peter, Paul and Mary, reached Billboard magazine’s Top Ten for 10 months, including seven weeks at No. 1. They sang If I had a Hammer at the August 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech.”

Yarrow wrote the music for the group’s best-known composition, Puff, the Magic Dragon, with lyrics by his Cornell classmate Leonard Lipton. The song became a standard both at summer camps and in college dorm rooms, where the counterculture saw drug references that Yarrow always denied were there.

The group performed regularly well after the folk revival faded. In a 1982 concert at Carnegie Hall they first sang Light One Candle, Yarrow’s song about the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Yarrow said he wrote the song (whose lyrics include “Light one candle to bind us together with peace”) to express his opposition to Israel’s war that year in Lebanon; the trio performed it the next year in Jerusalem to a large and mostly enthusiastic audience.

Yarrow was a supporter of the Israeli left-wing group Peace Now, which advocates for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yarrow was born in 1938 in New York City. His mother was a high school teacher in Manhattan; his father, who emigrated from Ukraine at age 16, was a lawyer who helped create Radio Free Europe, a U.S. propaganda channel launched during the Cold War. His parents divorced when he was five. According to Yarrow, he had no contact with his father until his mid-30s and credited his mother with instilling in him progressive values.

“What was important was learning. It was a Jewish family,” he told the Jewish Post. “There was money for education of every sort. There was money for music lessons, summer camp, and for her children, but not for jewelry or Rolex watches. She never stopped working. She was really focused on things of great importance. This is where my value system arose and my commitment to being an activist was what she embraced.”

Arthur Frommer, ‘wandering Jew’ who launched a travel guide empire

Andrew Silow-Carroll — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 15:55:07 +0000

(JTA) — Arthur Frommer, whose empire of travel guidebooks led one interviewer to call him the “quintessential wandering Jew,” died Monday, Nov. 18 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 95.

Starting in 1957 with the bestselling Europe on 5 Dollars a Day, Frommer rode a wave of postwar wanderlust among an expanding middle class that had the means and leisure to explore the world in ways once reserved for the very rich. (Frommer later updated the book’s title due to inflation.)

Six decades later his company’s books, some 350 titles, had sold more than 75 million copies. Before his death, he and his daughter Pauline Frommer, the co-president of FrommerMedia and editorial director of Frommer’s Guidebooks, published more than 130 active titles and co-hosted The Travel Show, a syndicated radio show; wrote regular syndicated columns, and contributed to the blog for the company’s eponymous online consumer travel website.

“I’ve always regarded travel as a superb learning experience,” he told Hadassah magazine in 2016. “It opens your imagination, expands your consciousness and brings you to understand other lifestyles, cultures, philosophies, and theologies.”

Arthur Frommer was born on July 17, 1929, in Lynchburg, Virginia; his parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria. They lived for a time in Jefferson City, Missouri, before moving to New York City when he was 14. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and worked as an office boy at Newsweek. He earned a political science degree from New York University. At Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1953, he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

He wrote his first manual, 1955’s The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe, while serving in Berlin in a U.S. Army intelligence unit. After returning to New York, he joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the first “white-shoe” firms to hire both Jews and gentiles.

On his first of many return vacations to Europe, he was inspired to write Europe on $5 a Day. Later, he enlisted local authors to write an ever-expanding series of guidebooks to Europe and beyond. For many years, according to Frommer, the company’s books made up close to 25% of all travel guides sold in the United States.

In 1977 he sold the brand to Simon & Schuster; in 2013, he bought it back from Google, which had acquired it the year before.

In the 2004 raunchy teen comedy EuroTrip, an actor playing Frommer meets a group of young travelers who had been using a Frommer guide throughout the movie, and offers a job to the book’s fiercest devotee. For years moviegoers thought the very British character was Frommer himself. Frommer was offered the cameo but turned it down because of scheduling demands.

In the Hadassah interview, he credited his parents, Nathan and Pauline, with inspiring his intellectual curiosity. “My sister, Jeanne, and I both had books no matter how little else we had,” he said. “Respect for education was a part of our Jewish heritage.”

He also described a trip he took in 2011 to his mother’s birthplace of Lomza, Poland, where he located his grandfather’s tombstone and learned more about the vibrant Jewish life there before the Holocaust.

“My whole life, I had heard stories about how horrific Poland was and how happy my relatives were to leave it,” he said. “Being there you saw the other side. They had vibrant communities, gorgeous temples, and fertile countryside. For the first time, I realized they had lost something by leaving.”

Frommer’s first marriage, to Hope Arthur, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Roberta Brodfeld; his daughter Pauline; stepdaughters Tracie Holder and Jill Holder, and four grandchildren.

Adam Abeshouse, Jewish producer of classical recordings

Andrew Silow-Carroll — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 16:18:48 +0000

(JTA) — Adam Abeshouse, a producer of classical music whose resume included three Grammy Awards as well as side gigs performing on Broadway in the pit orchestra of Fiddler on the Roof and setting up his synagogue’s sound system, died last month at his home in Westchester County, New York. He was 63.

The cause was bile duct cancer, according to his family.

A trained violinist who built what his wife Maria Abeshouse called his “dream” studio (and what the pianist Joshua Denk called a “nerd’s paradise”) at their home in South Salem, New York, Abeshouse produced recordings for a roster of A-list musical artists. They included violinists Itzhak Perlman and Joshua Bell, pianists Emanuel Ax and Simone Dinnerstein, and ensembles ranging from The Kronos Quartet to Russia’s St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.

His Grammys included classical producer of the year, in 1999.

He was also the founder, in 2002, of the Classical Recording Foundation, which helped artists record their passion projects when major record labels had begun to retreat from what the New York Times once called, in a story about the foundation, “projects of high artistic merit but low commercial priority.”

When others would wonder why the world needed more versions of previously recorded works, Abeshouse offered a sports analogy.

“But does anyone invoke that sort of reasoning when it comes to great tennis matches or baseball games?” he asked in a profile in The New Yorker in 2002. “If that axiom were applied to sporting events, the stadiums would be empty.”

Abeshouse was also a regular at his synagogue, the Pelham Jewish Center in Westchester County, where in addition to setting up the sound system, he would play in various ensembles, including on the holiday of Purim. “I have a Grammy-award winning sound engineer making sure everyone can hear my sermons,” the synagogue’s rabbi, Benjamin Resnick, joked at Abeshouse’s funeral.

Adam and Maria Abeshouse traveled to Israel with a group from the synagogue in 2005, and would return another five times.

“Growing up as Adam’s daughter meant joyful Shabbat dinners, delicious food, and superb wine,” his daughter Emily recalled at the funeral.

Before turning nearly full time to recording others, Abeshouse was a freelance violinist who appeared as a sub in the orchestra pits of Broadway musicals, including productions of Fiddler on the Roof in the 1990s. He can also be seen performing in the 1980 movie Fame about students at a performing arts high school in New York City.

Born June 5, 1961, Abeshouse grew up in Westbury, Long Island. His grandfather left Russia for China in the early years of the 20th century and spent 10 years in Harbin, a city in Northern Manchuria that was briefly a haven for Jews fleeing the Pale of Settlement. A balalaika player in the czar’s army orchestra, his grandfather eventually settled in Sydney, Australia, where he opened a music store.

Abehouse’s father, Jack, an accomplished amateur musician whose company compounded flavors and fragrances, moved to New York in 1952 and married his mother, Evy.

Abeshouse began playing violin in the third grade. He studied at New York University and the Manhattan School of Music.

This summer, when his disease metastasized and he entered home hospice, Abeshouse had two requests, according to his wife. The first was that the wedding of their daughter Emily to Jesse Weisfelner, a former lone soldier in the Israeli military, be moved from Dec. 29 to Sept. 15; the second was that friends and clients come to his studio for what would be a farewell concert a few weeks later.

According to a report in NPR, among those gathered for the concert were Bell, Denk, pianist Lara Downes, and the string trio Time for Three.

We’ve made many, many recordings together,” Bell told NPR. “I’ve spent many hours with him in the studios, doing a process which is usually excruciating for me. But with him it always became a fun time together. Those moments have been so precious to me.”

“He was able to enjoy and take part in both” the wedding and the concert, Maria, his wife of 38 years, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “He was very sociable, and afterwards he was pretty wired for a long time. He had meetings, then a big meeting on the phone the next day for his classical recording foundation. That and the studio were legacies that he wanted to go on.”

His survivors include his wife, his daughters Emily and Sarah, and a brother, David.