By Joe O’Connor
TORONTO — Samantha and Samara, and Rachel and Reut, and some of the other girls in the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy high school choir swear to me that the Passover music they will be performing later that night at the Richmond Hill Centre for Performing Arts is “cool,” “awesome,” and “enthralling.”
Mostly, though, it is old. Extremely old, and rare — as in Medieval old and Medieval rare. Johannes Rittangel, an obscure 17th-century Christian scholar with a fascination for Judaism had a particular fascination with the Haggadah — the liturgy of the Passover night Seder meal.
He translated it into Latin, a rare enough feat, but even rarer, in historical terms, was his decision to include the musical notation to the traditional Passover songs — a musical artifact that promptly got lost for 400 years until it popped up on a website devoted to Jewish historical curiosities in January.
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