Remembering Moshe Taube

We are very saddened at the USC Shoah Foundation to learn that our friend and Holocaust survivor Cantor Moshe Taube has passed away at age 93. Cantor Taube was among 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust and led in the chanting of prayers at Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh.

Born in Krakow, Poland, in June 1927, Cantor Taube began singing and studying music at a young age. In 1939 he and his family were interned at the Krakow ghetto and then, in 1942, sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Krakow-Płaszów. His mother, sister and dozens of other family members were subsequently killed, but Taube and his father were spared thanks to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who ran the munitions factory in which the pair were forced to work.

After liberation by Soviet troops in 1945, Taube and his father were eventually able to immigrate to what was then British Mandate Palestine. In 1957 he moved to the United States, where he studied music at the Juilliard School in New York and subsequently taught young cantors at the Jewish Theological Seminary before moving to Pennsylvania and becoming cantor at the Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh. For seventeen years, beginning in 1971, he also held the position of Adjunct Professor of Voice and Vocal Literature at Duquesne University.

In his 1996 testimony to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Moshe Taube describes the transformative power of music in his development as a child in Krakow.

Read a tribute to Moshe Taube on Times of Israel.