Cantor ‘Rooted’ in Area’s Jewish History Retiring

In the current issue of Temple Beth Torah’s monthly newsletter, Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller writes “Ralph Moses, the cantor, may be retiring from Ventura’s Temple Beth Torah, but Ralph Moses, the mensch, is not.

“By ‘mensch,’ I mean a person of real quality,” Hochberg-Miller said this week, looking back on her friendship with Moses. “Ralph has been a part of our congregation for 60 years, since he was a boy of 10. He is rooted in the Jewish history of Ventura County.”

So were his parents, Martin and Rosel Moses, who fled Nazi Germany with their two young sons in 1938. After arriving in Ventura that year, the family helped found the Ventura County Jewish Council.

“Ralph has been the soul of this temple, its voice,” said Superior Court Judge Steven Perrin, who sometimes acts as a stand-in cantor for the man he calls his mentor.

In Judaism, the worship service is traditionally presided over by a rabbi and a cantor, who leads the singing and chanting of prayers, often in Hebrew. “A cantor is seen as co-clergy to a rabbi,” Hochberg-Miller said.

Moses was not always a cantor, nor did he intend to be.

“I went to school in Ventura, then to UCLA and Berkeley,” Moses said last week. “I became an optometrist in Port Hueneme in 1951.”

He met his wife-to-be, Marilyn Rosenblum, an Oxnard schoolteacher at the time, and married her in 1954. Ever since, he and Marilyn have lived in Port Hueneme, where they raised three sons.

“I started out as a backup, fill-in cantor in 1959,” Moses said as he sat in his memorabilia-filled office at the temple. He didn’t become the temple’s official, salaried cantor until 1989, “when the cantor before me resigned.”

Moses looked around his office, which is filled with awards and commendations. He smiled and swept his hand.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with all these plaques.”

The plaques are not for cantoring only. He has taught Hebrew history to youngsters at the temple and prepared them for bat and bar mitzvahs.

“And I may do some tutoring in the future,” he said.

Hochberg-Miller hopes so.

“He is thoughtful to 5-year-olds and 95-year-olds,” she said. “He even teaches Israeli folk dancing to children in the summer. His love of children is such that when he sings a song, he will come right out and cradle a child’s chin while he’s singing.”

Moses can remember when the county didn’t have a synagogue or a temple. The first meetings of the 43 families that made up the Ventura County Jewish Council were held in Ventura’s Coca-Cola bottling plant.

“And there was no Jewish food in Ventura County then,” Moses said. “Max Stein, who was on the founding board, would drive to Fairfax in Los Angeles and pick up Jewish food like rye bread and deliver it to Ventura County.

“At that time, our home was called the Jewish USO--people were always in and out. After 60 years, I’d say there’s been some progress.”

Moses is retiring “because I’m well, not because I’m sick,” he said. “For once, I don’t want to have to be anywhere.”

There is one more place that he will have to be--at his retirement dinner and celebration June 19 at Temple Beth Torah. It will be a celebration tinged with sadness as he passes the torch to the new cantor, Michael Anatole, who comes from Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks.

“Ralph is absolutely identifiable with Temple Beth Torah,” Perrin said. “All of us here owe a little bit to him.”

FYI: For tickets to Ralph Moses’ retirement dinner, at $5 each, call 647-4181.