PORTLAND, Maine — Kurt Messerschmidt, the former cantor at Portland’s Temple Beth El who came to Maine after escaping death during the Holocaust, was laid to rest Friday afternoon at the synagogue where he’d served as a spiritual and community leader for more than three decades.
Messerschmidt — who was born in Germany during World War I and stayed in the country to teach Jewish children despite the rise of the Nazi Party, eventually leading to his imprisonment in a concentration camp — died Tuesday. He was 102.
During a memorial service, the cantor’s dedication and exacting style as a teacher were remembered as having shaped beautiful choirs. And his patience and high standards coaxed tuneful melodies out of generations of young Mainers studying for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the Jewish coming of age ceremonies.
The laughs and lamentations of more than 200 gathered mourners echoed off the wood and white plaster walls of the Beth El sanctuary as Messerschmidt’s family recalled a man who had survived one of the darkest hours of human history with his optimism and zeal for life intact.
“He’d experienced and witnessed humanity at its worst,” Michael Messerschmidt said of his father, “yet wanted to be a model of humanity at its best.”
Messerschmidt shared the dark chapters of his early life in a 1993 Maine Public Television documentary. He recalled, at the age of 18, being forced off a streetcar by the mob that took to the streets of Berlin the night Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
“First I heard the marching steps of people carrying torches,” Messerschmidt said in the film. “I realized those were Nazis who, in their brown shirts, celebrated their coming to power on that fateful day.”
Along with other German Jews, Messerschmidt was eventually sent to a ghetto in Czechoslovakia, where he met and married his wife Sonja.
The pair were separated when Messerschmidt was sent to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in Poland. But he survived the prisoner death marches that killed tens of thousands of Jews near the end of World War II, eventually reuniting with his wife and traveling to the United States.
Messerschmidt’s remarkable optimism was apparent in how he spoke of the Holocaust, Beth El Rabbi Carolyn Braun said Friday. “Those were only a few years out of many good ones,” she recalled him saying.
Kurt and Sonja Messerschmidt’s decades in Maine brought them a revered place in the Portland Jewish community, as well as children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. He was an accomplished musician and singer, and Sarah Weber said Friday that she and other grandchildren would call Messerschmidt “grandpa piano.”
And even after the death of his wife in 2010, Messerschmidt maintained his sense of purpose and joy in new challenges.
At the age of 100, Messerschmidt took great pleasure in purchasing a new, blue Buick Regal with space in the trunk for his walker, according to Eva Polisner, his daughter. And during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, he decided to refresh the Russian he had not spoken in 80 years, Messerschmidt’s son said.
“His will to life was so strong nothing could defeat it,” said Polisner. “Not the Nazis and not the loss of his beloved wife.”
Shiva services will be held at the The Atrium retirement community at 640 Ocean Ave at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday and 4.30 p.m. on Sunday.