Samuel E. Goldfarb

Samuel Eliezer Goldfarb (Hebrew: שמעון אליעזר גולדפרב‎‎, June 18, 1891 – October 22, 1978), was an American composer, arranger, choir conductor, music director, cantor, piano accompanist, and educator.

Goldfarb was born in Lower East Side, New York City. His Hebrew name was given in honor of his mother's deceased father. Born to Polish immigrants Malya Molly Goldfarb and Nesanel Dovid Bryer, a cantor and small merchant, he was raised in a strictly traditional Hasidic family along with 5 brothers and 5 sisters on 4th Street in Lower East Side. His family attended the Shinyeve Chevreh synagogue, named after the immigrants' home town of Shinyeve (the Yiddish name of Sieniawa) in Galicia, the seat of the tsadik Rabbi Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam. As a boy, he attended Public School Number 4 on 203 Rivington Street, followed by daily lessons in the Machzikei Talmud Torah school at 227 East Broadway. In his teens, he went to DeWitt Clinton High School on West 13th Street, and studied Gemara with a private tutor.

Samuel showed an early interest in music, learning to read music from his much older brother, Rabbi Israel Goldfarb, and singing in local synagogue boys' choirs, and he went on to study composition, conducting, and voice at Columbia University Teachers College and take private piano and organ lessons while earning a living by playing theater piano in a Yiddish movie and vaudeville theater on Rivington Street and in a nickelodeon on Sutton Street. In 1914, on October 20, he married Bella Horowitz in Brooklyn, and the couple had two children, Myron and Ruth. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree from Columbia, Goldfarb stayed in New York for several years working as a choir conductor, accompanist, composer, and arranger. As an accompanist, he worked with local songwriters such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, cantors such as Yossele Rosenblatt and the four Kusevitsky brothers, and theatrical stars such as Molly Picon.

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