East meets West
Cantor brings a Sephardi groove to Montclair’s Shomrei Emunah

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

When Galeet Dardashti led her first service Sept. 9 as the new cantor of Montclair’s Congregation Shomrei Emunah, she chose a Persian melody for the Hashkiveinu prayer.

And no wonder: Persian melodies are the heritage of a woman who, in addition to her cantorial duties, is the force behind Divahn, an all-woman band that specializes in the Mizrahi beats of Jewish North Africa and the Middle East.

Granddaughter of a famous Iranian singer, daughter of a cantor, and part of the Dardashti Family Singers, she has been performing since the age of three. “I’d be banished from my family if I weren’t a singer,” she joked.

She is also a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, working to complete her dissertation on Middle Eastern and Arabic music in Israel.

“I’m a Jewish geek,” she told NJ Jewish News over coffee at the Crossroads Cafe in her Winthrop Terrace neighborhood in Brooklyn. Dardashti, 32, with dark curly hair swept up to reveal dangling silver earrings, sailed into the small cafe dressed in a tank top and long peasant skirt. She sat down to share her interest in her new Montclair congregation, her excitement over living in the New York City area, and her passion for Divahn.

Dardashti’s training is nearly all informal, coming from a lifetime of immersion in music and Judaism. She had only two years of formal, classical voice training plus one year of Persian vocal training, and no formal cantorial training — she learned most of what she knows from her father, Farid Dardashti, who trained as a cantor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Her work at Shomrei Emunah, however, is only a piece of Dardashti’s musical life. While she “falls in and out of love” with academia, where she takes the scholarly side of music seriously, Divahn is her passion. Begun in 2001 as “a fun outlet for a nerdy academic,” the four-woman band was an instant hit at its first performance at a small Austin club, the Cactus Cafe. “I had no idea the band would go anywhere,” she added.

Definitely not a klezmer band — the Eastern European-Jewish musical tradition — the group bills itself as a purveyor of Middle Eastern and Sephardi music. Some of their numbers are traditional songs like the Hebrew “Yigdal” or the Ladino “Cuando el Rey Nimrod.” But with the sounds of such instruments as the tabla, cello, rabel, doumbek, and violin, Divahn’s ages-old songs, performed in Hebrew, Ladino, Arabic, Aramaic, and, more recently, Persian, have a decidedly contemporary groove. It’s ethnic music with a broad appeal. In fact, in the beginning, the group rarely performed at Jewish venues, and many of their fans were non-Jews who simply liked their sound.

Within seven months of its founding, Divahn cut its first CD and then started touring nationally. In the New York area, they have played at synagogues and clubs, including Makor in Manhattan. Most recently, Divahn played at the New York Jewish Music and Heritage Festival on Sept. 19 and 21.

As members of Divahn began to scatter to areas far from Austin, however, it became more difficult to hold the group together. Dardashti herself left for a stint in Israel to do field work for her dissertation. Today, Dardashti is the only remaining original member of the band. But she is determined to keep the group going. Currently, nearly all the band members live in the New York area. And there are plans afoot for a second CD, with four songs already recorded.

A whole different level

Despite her lack of formal training, she said, taking on the role of cantor is “not so random…. I grew up in the Conservative movement. My father was a hazan at a Conservative synagogue. I tutored bar and bat mitzva kids.”

She started leading High Holy Day services about six years ago at a synagogue in Savannah and fell in love with the role. “I was concerned that I couldn’t pray spiritually if I was the person leading it. But I found I was so into the service as shlihat tzibur [prayer leader], it was a whole different level of experience than I’d ever had before.”

But Dardashti had her reservations when Shomrei Emunah’s Rabbi E. Noach Shapiro, a family friend, approached her with the idea of joining him on the bima. “I wanted to make sure they would be happy with a nontraditional cantor.”

The more she learned about Montclair and about the community, the more excited she became. Finally she agreed, and the congregation hired her as a part-time cantor. She will lead services twice a month and teach. Her goal is to ensure that services at Shomrei Emunah are not exactly run-of-the-mill.

“I want people to be moved by the service and come away feeling like prayer can and should be a spiritual, meaningful experience…,” Dardashti said. “You can walk into a lot of Conservative synagogues today and you can feel really uninspired. The challenge for me, together with Noach, is to grapple with the traditional service and figure out how to change it but stay within the parameters of tradition and Halacha.”

Using Persian melodies is one way to do that, but she doesn’t want to “mizrahicize” the service, as she put it. So she’ll seek to inspire the congregants by drawing from the rest of her knowledge. She’s now considering teaching piyyutim, or prayer poems, something she’s working with for her dissertation.

Dardashti points out that a creeping boredom with services is not a new struggle in Judaism. “We have forgotten that people used to write piyyutim. People wanted variation in services. We’re talking hundreds of years ago. This is not a novel idea.” The authors of the poems, she said, “were fighting against a rigid service.” She commented on the irony that some of these piyyutim are now part of the regular service.

Dardashti settled in Brooklyn’s Winthrop Terrace, just outside Park Slope, with her husband just a year and a half ago and acknowledged feeling overwhelmed by the Jewish cultural scene in New York City. “I’ve always been the person I am with a strong passion for Jewish culture. But I never lived in New York. It’s been like, wow: Look at all these people to collaborate with. People are asking me to do things right and left, and it’s hard to say no. Austin was a challenge because it was wide open. Here, there’s so much to do!”

Asked how she manages her time, she laughed. “I have none.” She is learning the art of “no” but still shows an enthusiasm for squeezing in every available opportunity, from part-time work with the educational cooperative Storahtelling to leading Selihot services at Manhattan’s B’nai Jeshurun to, of course, her part-time cantoring gig in Montclair.

As the interview drew to a close, a stranger in the cafe, a newcomer to the area, inquired about local Jewish opportunities and synagogues. With her trademark enthusiasm, Dardashti immediately ticked off three synagogues, stopped for a moment, and added, “And you should come over for Shabbat dinner.”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.