Firestone, a trailblazing cantor, passes awayat 90
Canada’s first female cantor died on May 28 after a brief battle with brain cancer. She was 90 years old.
Esther Ghan Firestone, who was also known for her singing career on CBC Radio and her opera singing, made waves in the Canadian Jewish community when she began working as a cantor in the 1950s despite Judaism generally only accepting men in the role.
Firestone was born in Winnipeg on April 9, 1925. She moved to Toronto in 1944 where she began voice training. She made her CBC Radio debut on Canadian Cavalcade and sang on Starlight Moods from 1949 to 1951.
Venturing into opera in 1951, Firestone debuted at the Musetta in La Bohème with the CBC opera and continued to perform live, most notably for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, before landing her own show, Stardust from 1957 to 1960.
Debbie Firestone, Firestone’s oldest daughter, remembers hearing her mother perform on CBC Radio.
“I would hear her on the radio and she’d be standing in the kitchen giving me dinner and I couldn’t figure out how she could be in two different places at the same time,” Debbie said.
What made her mother special to her was that she was one of the only women who worked full-time while raising her children.
“Mothers were homemakers,” Debbie said. “My mother had a career that involved concerts, singing and being well-known. She was doing it before there was such a thing as feminism.”
Firestone was not an ordained cantor, and as Debbie said, even if she wanted to be, there wouldn’t have been much of a possibility of a school accepting her. She instead learned to perform by going to synagogues, listening to the traditional prayer and Jewish melodies, and writing them out.
Debbie still remembers the backlash her mother received.
“She started to sing the prayers and all of a sudden an old man behind me said: ‘What’s this? A woman? All my life I wouldn’t imagine that could be,’ ” Debbie said. “It was not the norm. She had such a beautiful voice that I guess people began to tolerate it.”
Firestone was an active cantor since the mid-1950s, when she started performing at Beth-El Synagogue. She served as a cantor at Congregation Habonim from 1985 until her death.
Eli Rubenstein, religious leader at the Congregation Habonim, worked with Firestone for more than 30 years. He remembers how her performances had the ability to even affect atheists.
“She had amazing ability to connect people with centuries of Jewish tradition and prayer,” Rubenstein said. “Even the people in the congregation who were atheists or who had doubts about God couldn’t help but be moved by (Firestone).”