The Eliezer Abinun Archive
This archive includes the vast majority of the liturgical tradition of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation of London, as recorded by the Rev. Eliezer Abinun, Hazan of the congregation for over 50 years.
Eliezer Abinun was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1912, and studied at the Sarajevo Jewish seminary. He continued his training with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation in London in 1936, when he was appointed Assistant Hazzan, becoming Senior Hazzan in 1939. He was thus saved from the fate of most of his family, who perished in Croatian concentration camps and in Auschwitz during the German occupation of Yugoslavia in WW2.
Following his retirement in 1982 Mr. Abinun (as he was always styled) and his wife Rachael moved to the Old City of Jerusalem, where he lived until his passing in 1998, aged 86.
Mr. Abinun was perhaps the ultimate practitioner of, and authority on, the liturgical music of the London Sephardi tradition. In his younger years he had a voice of exceptional range, beauty and depth of interpretation. His poignant renderings of the traditional Torah readings for Bereshit and the Ten Commandments, for example, were looked forward to by congregants each year and known to draw tears of appreciation from many. Those of us that experienced his superb renditions have never forgotten them, and to this day when the ark is opened and closed on Shabbat - wherever I may be - I hear in my mind his beautifully solemn chanting of the traditional verses.
Most of the recordings presented here were made in 1984, after his move to Israel, when he was in his seventies. We believe this archive to be an invaluable resource for those wishing to study and appreciate our beautiful Western Sephardi tradition.
To play the large, unsplit files, click the links below. To listen to smaller, individual files, use the table of contents on the left.Â
Learn more about the team that created this site here.