members who had migrated from Łódź and were living in New Jersey. Herman and Sina Berlinski settled in Manhattan and their son David was born there in 1942. Berlinski first earned a living by giving private piano lessons, and quickly made contact with the city's large Jewish community. A significant event in Berlinski's professional development was a meeting with Moshe Rudinow who was at that time cantor of New York's Temple Emanu-El, one of the city's leading Reform synagogues. Through Rudinow he was introduced to the then-named Jewish Music Forum, a body which was set up to promote the study and analysis of all aspects of Jewish music and to organize the performance of new music, and he became an invited member in 1944. There he met key musicians, composers and musicologists including Lazar Weiner, Joseph Yasser, Abraham Wolfe Binder and Lazare Saminsky. He also heard there the then young and relatively unknown Leonard Bernstein performing his new works including a piano reduction of his first symphony. He studied composition with Messiaen at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Center and gained from him an understanding of rhythmic and harmonic techniques which would affect his approach to using Jewish melodic forms in his later works. A change in Berlinski's career occurred in 1951 when Yasser offered him organ lessons. As a result, he quickly demonstrated skill both as a recitalist and as a liturgical organist, setting the direction for the future both in terms of his professional appointments and the types of works which he composed. By 1954 he had been appointed as assistant organist at Emanu-El working with Saminsky as music director. He gave his first public recital the following year. He served there for a total of eight years, during which time he composed many works including choral and other liturgical music as well as organ pieces. In 1953, while continuing his organ studies with Yasser, Berlinski undertook postgraduate studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA) where he engaged in a musicological analysis of the origins and practices of ancient Jewish music. He also studied composition with Hugo Weisgall, an experienced composer who was descended from a long line of cantors and was interested in both sacred and secular Jewish music. Working with Weisgall and in the climate of the seminary provided an ideal stimulus for Berlinski to further explore and express his Jewish background, which in turn