A Yiddish Gift For Hanukkah - with Stewart Figa

STEWART FIGA has served as cantor at West Suburban Temple Har Zion in River Forest, Illinois, since 1998 and has been a cantor in the Chicago area since 1990. An established and in-demand performer of Yiddish and Jewish music, he has performed at YIVO in New York, and his programs for the annual Chicago YIVO Society Summer Festival have been cheered by capacity audiences. In the 1980s Stewart Figa performed several seasons in Yiddish theater productions in New York City where he had the rare privilege of working with, and befriending some of the legendary greats of the pre-war Yiddish Theatre and Yiddish Film scenes, such as Leon Liebgold, Seymore Rexite, Reizl Bozyk, and Max Perlman. In 2015, Mr. Figa received a Grammy nomination for his work as a vocalist with the New Budapest Orpheum Society on their CD “As Dreams Fall Apart” which the ensemble followed up with a successful four-city tour in England. With the NBOS he has also delighted audiences in Vienna and throughout Germany and in New York City. Most meaningful for him, Stewart has sung at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, where a wartime picture of father Leon Figa, a Partisan resistance fighter in the forests of Belarus, is on permanent display.