Cantor Janet Leuchter
Cantor Janet Leuchter 
grew up in Vineland, NJ in the 1950s and 60s, in a family of newspaper owners and journalists. Her parents and grandmothers were also leaders in synagogue, Zionist and Jewish communal life from local to international. She has continued that tradition of Jewish involvement in various ways throughout her life, as both a volunteer and professional. Her Jewish involvement has spanned Zionism, havurah Judaism, Jewish feminism, Soviet Jewry, the world of Yiddish, social justice, and family history research.
grew up in Vineland, NJ in the 1950s and 60s, in a family of newspaper owners and journalists. Her parents and grandmothers were also leaders in synagogue, Zionist and Jewish communal life from local to international. She has continued that tradition of Jewish involvement in various ways throughout her life, as both a volunteer and professional. Her Jewish involvement has spanned Zionism, havurah Judaism, Jewish feminism, Soviet Jewry, the world of Yiddish, social justice, and family history research.
Becoming a cantor in middle age brought together Judaism and music for her in a new and fulfilling way. Ordained in 1999 by Hebrew Union College in New York, she served two years at Temple Avodah in Oceanside, NY, and nine years at Congregation Beth Elohim, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she was the first full-time ordained cantor in its 150-year old history and helped transition worship style from classical Reform to participatory and diverse. She has served Greenburgh Hebrew Center since the fall of 2010. She is eclectic and comfortable in diverse worship styles, from traditional davenning to Reform and "renewal."
Before becoming a cantor, Cantor Leuchter pursued a classical career in recital and oratorio, and also appeared in several musical theater pieces by "downtown" playwrights Maria Irene Fornes and Elizabeth Swados. But her longest musical involvement has been as a performer and teacher of Yiddish songs and klezmer music. Active in the early years of the klezmer revival, she was the vocalist with the pioneering women's band Klez-meydlekh and has performed and taught Yiddish songs and klezmer music from Lincoln Center and international klezmer festivals to private simchas and living rooms. She can be heard on several recordings and film soundtracks well-known in the Yiddish world. This past December, she was featured in a concert of women cantors singing traditional cantorial music in tribute to the “khazntes,” as part of the international cultural festival Yiddish New York.
Her Masters of Sacred Music project at HUC focused on Yiddish religious traditional song, its context within the larger body of East Ashkenazic religious song, and its survival after the Holocaust. Her thesis was accepted by the library of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and later published in edited form in the Journal of Synagogue Music (2007).
She has also worked professionally as a writer, notably at the Anti-Defamation League, where, among other things, she developed the first promotional materials for the Foundation for the Righteous (then called the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers). She was also the Jewish outreach coordinator for the Jewish Fund for Justice, which provided financial and technical aid to local partnerships between synagogues and Jewish groups, and non-Jewish grassroots community organizations working on a variety of social-justice issues. JFJ subsequently merged with several other groups and morphed into what is today known as Bend the Arc.
She has studied vocal pedagogy, has taught college-level students as an adjunct instructor, and while not at GHC, teaches adolescents and teens in NYC. She shares her life with Hal Glicksman, a veteran tv producer in news, public affairs and promotion for CBS and NBC, who in retirement has become a successful NYC tour guide.
Sincerely,
The Journal Dinner Committe