Abstract
In synagogues in both Germany and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Sonderling (1878–1964) used the arts, primarily music and drama, in an attempt to renew the Jewish liturgy. His main position for almost 30 years was to serve as rabbi at the Society for Jewish Culture/Fairfax Temple in Los Angeles, which he founded in 1935 and where he could freely apply his ideas, inspired in part by the theory of the five senses from Rabbi Moses Isserles’s Torat Ha-Olah. Drawing on Sonderling’s writings, archival materials in the United States and Austria, an oral history interview with Sonderling’s granddaughter Diane Sonderling Gray, and other sources, we argue that Sonderling’s efforts to renew Jewish religious and cultural life through the arts resulted to a great extent from the change in his religious outlook in Europe from Orthodox to Reform Judaism. Since an understanding of Sonderling’s work makes little sense without an analysis of his complex religious background, the article begins with a discussion of his life and career in Europe before turning to his immigration to the United States in 1923 and his subsequent work in Los Angeles.