ובמקהלות | Meeting of Souls

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Cantor Benzion Miller

released January 14, 2026

Produced by Jeremiah Lockwood
Choir directed by Shimmy Miller

Choir
Shimmy Miller
Elii Miller
Mechy Miller
Jeremiah Lockwood
Yossi Pechenik
Sruly Federman
Berel Tondowski

Recorded and mixed by Vince Chiarito at Hive Mind Recording, Brooklyn, NY

Photo by Michał Ramus (courtesy of the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival)
Graphic layout by Jacob Lockwood

Cantor Benzion Miller (1947-2025) was one of the last of a generation of creative prayer leaders, a generational talent both as a vocalist and composer/improviser in the khazones tradition. Son of Cantor Aaron Miller, a link in a chain of an intergenerational cantorial family, and a child of Galicianer Poland and the Bobov Hasidic community, Cantor Miller resided in Brooklyn for most of his life. For four decades he presided at the omud of Beth El of Borough Park, the iconic Moorish style synagogue that has served as a center of cantorial culture since its founding in 1902. Constructed as an ideal acoustic environment for cantorial vocal performance, Beth El has boasted a succession of star cantors, including luminaries of the gramophone-era recording industry like Berele Chagy, Mordechai Hershman, Moshe Koussevitzky and Moshe Stern. Cantor Miller’s acclaim was international: since the 1990s he maintained a special relationship with the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival and performed there, back in his native home, on an almost yearly basis for decades.

This record captures a beautiful moment: a master of a traditional art form, facing his last days with bravery and faith, surrounded by family and admiring friends, singing with great vitality and creativity. Recorded in 2024, just months before his passing, Meeting of Souls is a rare document of creative cantorial improvisation in its archetypal format: cantor and choir singing a capella, as would be the typical texture in synagogue prayer leading.

I started singing in the choir at Beth El for Benzion’s monthly Shabbos mevarchim (Sabbath of the new month) prayer leading service in 2021. Benzion’s davening was a transformative experience. Walking home through the snow on the long way home from the service on a Shabbos morning, I was exhausted—the service was typically four hours long—and elevated; the streets raced before me. Being enveloped in the sound of Benzion’s voice and his magisterial evocation of the long history of Yiddish sacred music, I felt a rupture in time, a healing suture that bridged together different historical moments: the choir shuls of the great Jewish metropolises of Europe that have been lost forever; the immigrant prayer services in New York led by stars newly arrived across the Atlantic; and the sound of the gramophone cantors of the 1920s, but more specifically the pipe smoke-filled back room of my grandparents apartment in Queens and the hours we spent listening to tapes of reissues of the old masters, hushed and meditative in the waves of sound. The experience of singing in the choir supporting Benzion was a healing for me, offering a place where I felt the world made a kind of sense, where a momentary spherical harmony between sound and history prevailed, even if the entire undertaking was hanging on by a slender thread produced by the knowledge and labor of a fragile elder.

(liner notes by J Lockwood)