גודל הטקסט
In Hasidic music today, the family names Werdyger and Ben David are heard constantly. At the head of this dynasty stands Reb David Werdyger, who was born in Poland on October 30, 1919, the youngest of eight children, and grew up in Krakow in a Gerrer Hasidic home. Already as a child he sang in the synagogue and in the Ger choirs.
The Nazi occupation in 1939 cut everything short. Werdyger underwent forced labor and arrests, and his parents disappeared after leaving the Podgorze ghetto and were never seen again. From biographical records it emerges that he was sent to the Plaszow camp, and there, according to the description based mainly on his autobiography, he was saved from execution following an appeal from the camp commandant Amon Goeth, who asked about his occupation and asked him to recite a mourner's prayer. Afterward he was transferred to Oskar Schindler's factory and to other camps, among them Mauthausen-Gusen and Linz. In May 1945 he was liberated.
After the war he married Malka Gudinger, lived for a short time in Paris and emigrated to New York in 1950. He served as a cantor in synagogues on the Lower East Side and at the Talmud Torah "New Lots" in Brooklyn, and also made a living from a travel agency he opened, "Werdyger Travel."
The contribution for which he is especially remembered came in the field of recordings. His first record came out in 1959, and afterward he founded the company "Aderet" to publish Hasidic melodies. According to The Yeshiva World and other sources, he recorded about sixty albums, including the melodies of Bobov, Boyan, Skulen, Melitz, Radomsk and Ger. In this way the melodies of many courts made their way onto records. He performed in the United States, Canada and England, and his cantorial singing was also heard in the PBS documentary film on Hasidism in America from 1997.
The continuation of the story was written by his sons. The couple had four sons, and one of them, the singer Mordechai Ben David, set out on an independent path as a singer. Another son, Mendy Werdyger, entered the business at age 21, and he is the owner of "Aderet" and of the store "Mostly Music" in Brooklyn, and is himself a singer and a cantor on the High Holidays at the Ger shtiebel in Boro Park. The grandchildren Yedidia and Yisroel Werdyger also follow this path.
In 1993 Werdyger published his autobiography, "Songs of Hope." He passed away in New York in April 2014, at the age of 94. His biography passes from the Krakow of Ger, through the camps, to Brooklyn, where "Aderet" continues to operate under his son.
Sources: English Wikipedia (David Werdyger, Mendy Werdyger); The Yeshiva World; Save the Music
Image: DMY, CC BY-SA 3.0 / GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons.