By David Chesanow, JTNews Correspondent
With so many glowing memories of Julie Mirel singing from the bimah, Tacoma’s Temple Beth El is preparing to bid a warm farewell to the cantorial soloist, who retires from her position in June after nine years of service. Mirel will be honored at a private dinner with some 60 well-wishers at the Fircrest Golf Club in Tacoma on May 11; later that evening, a concert tribute to Mirel, featuring former Temple Beth El congregant Rabbi/Cantor Angela Warnick Buchdahl, will be held at the temple. Brad Smith, of Olympia, will be the new solist.
Originally from the Chicago area, Julie Mirel, 52, studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. She met her husband, Jim Mirel, senior rabbi of Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue, when he was a rabbinical student in Cincinnati. The couple moved to Seattle in 1974. They have two daughters: Chava, 26, and Shoshana, 22.
Julie’s musical career is wide-ranging: She has done everything from opera and oratorio to art-song recitals, cabaret and musical theater — not to mention “lots of Jewish music.” A mezzo-soprano, she has also sung yearly in the Music of Remembrance concert series, dedicated to performing work composed during or in memory of the Holocaust. While she has no formal cantorial instruction — hence her title of cantorial soloist rather than cantor — she explained: “I sort of picked up my cantorial training by osmosis: being around the synagogue, working with my husband, working with his cantor, David Serkin-Poole, and just being a Jew.”
In 1993, when an ad for the soloist’s opening at Temple Beth El ran in The Jewish Transcript, Julie hesitated to apply at first; she got the position after performing a concert at the temple at the request of the late Rabbi Richard Rosenthal. “He knew me as a singer, and he knew me as a colleague’s wife, but he had not heard me do anything cantorial,” she recalled. “Basically, my concert was an audition.” Rabbi Rosenthal and the search committee approved.
Rabbi Mark Glickman, who succeeded Rabbi Rosenthal as leader of the Tacoma congregation five years ago, speaks movingly of Mirel’s talent: “Her voice is just majestic. In Hebrew the word for ‘soul’ and ‘breath’ is the same: neshamah. And it wasn’t until I heard Julie sing — it wasn’t until I heard what happens when Julie allows her breath and soul to combine as she shares her music — that I understood the meaning of that insight.”
Julie worked part-time at first — i.e., not every Shabbat — but after Rabbi Glickman’s arrival, the soloist’s responsibilities were expanded to singing at Shabbat services every week and she was charged with organizing congregational adult and youth choirs. The temple had not had a congregational choir before, although under Rabbi Rosenthal and early in Julie’s tenure a non-Jewish professional quartet had performed out of view of the congregants. When a call for adult choir members was published in the temple bulletin, 36 people showed up for the first audition. Says Julie, “It was shocking. We thought maybe )eight…and frankly, the 20 people who were the core of that group are still members of the choir in its fifth year.”
“The choir varies — it’s a purely volunteer choir — from people who have a fair amount of background in music to people who are complete novices and have no knowledge of reading music and some who even don’t read Hebrew,” notes Andy Levine, a choir member and former president of the congregation. “With that challenge, Julie’s brought us along and we have quite a good repertoire of pieces and I think we do a really good job. And the kids have done an amazing job, but they’re like sponges: They’re a bit easier to work with.”
The youth choir has about a dozen regulars. One Shabbat service each month is conducted by the religious school classes, with choir members in the fourth to eighth grades leading the singing — “a kid-led, kid-sung service once a month,” Julie points out.
By all accounts, under Julie Mirel’s musical direction, the congregation of Temple Beth El has undergone a transformation in its approach to singing. In many synagogues, when the cantor begins a solo, everyone listens in silence, in part because traditional cantorial pieces are often hard to sing. Rabbi Glickman credits Julie with making the music more accessible as well as encouraging congregants to sing, and choir members mixed in with the congregation instill more confidence. “We are not performing — we are part of the congregation,” declares sisterhood president Stephanie Levine, Andy Levine’s wife. “If we’re planted among the congregation, then they can hear us and sing along. It elevates the whole spirit of the service and increases the participation: It’s more joy…”
Asked her reasons for retiring as cantorial soloist, Mirel cited the worsening commute from Seattle on Friday afternoons: “My teeth are ground to dust, and I’m supposed to try to be a spiritual leader, which is my intent — and it’s very difficult when you’ve just dealt with two hours of bone-crunchingly slow traffic.”
Then there is the synagogue life she can’t enjoy with her family: “In the past couple of years, I feel that I’ve missed a lot,” she continues. “My daughter [Chava, also an accomplished singer] and my husband lead services at B’nai Torah practically every week…and I have missed that every time for two years. When I was going off to Tacoma for Rosh Hashanah, they were getting ready to lead Rosh Hashanah services together, and I was very sad about that, and thinking: You know, my life is happening without me, and I’d like to be there to be a part of it.”
She had nothing but praise and affection for the people of Temple Beth El: “My only negative ‘relationship’ is with Interstate 5.”
What’s next for Julie Mirel? She will continue to give every concert she can “within reason,” and emphasizes: “I don’t want to give the impression that I’m retiring from musical life.” She has plans to earn hospital chaplaincy certification and sing at the bedsides of the sick and the dying: songs with special associations for patients and their families — what parents sang to children, or what families sang around the dinner table. “Music has the ability to get into the regions that words cannot reach,” she observes. “And I think that it awakens sensations even in unconscious patients that words can’t get to: the vibrations and the warmth that music can bring…”
Rabbi/Cantor Angela Warnick Buchdahl, of Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, N.Y., will perform a concert in honor of Julie Mirel at Temple Beth El in Tacoma on Saturday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m., followed by a dessert reception. The theme of the concert will be people who have led Israel in song. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for children ages 6–12, children age 5 and under free. Call 253-564-7101.