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Prime Times Weekly publication of the Mail Tribune , Medford, Oregon Photo by Jim Craven Under the watchful eye of her Hebrew teacher, Paul Perper, Leona Mitchell reads from the Torah at Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland. SHARING the TRADITION 85-year-old Paul Perper continues to contribute his music and style to Ashland's Temple Emek Shalom By MELISSA MARTIN ASHLAND -- Leona Mitchell inhales deeply as she unrolls the Torah for the first time, finds her place with the Yad, a silver pointer, and begins singing the Ten Commandments. She has no musical symbols or English translation in front of her, only a parchment scroll, ornately scripted in an ancient language. She's studied weekly with Hebrew teacher Paul Perper in preparation for her bat mitzvah, the day she reads from the Torah in front of the congregation. And for a moment, during this practice session, she's overcome by it and weeps. "It's pretty powerful," she says, taking in another deep breath. Perper, who has been standing next to her by the podium, pats her back, smiles in understanding and flashes his twinkling eyes at her, giving her the "you-can-do-it" look. "She has such a beautiful, beautiful voice. It just makes you melt," Perper says. "I have a big sense of pride just hearing her read from the Torah today." Perper has been preparing adult students like Mitchell, as well as hundreds of Southern Oregon children, for their bar and bat mitzvahs, Jewish ceremonies that celebrate religious passage into adulthood. In the 20 years he's lived in the Rogue Valley, Perper has taught about 200 boys and girls ages 12 to 13 how to read the Torah portions in Hebrew and how to understand the cantillation symbols, which explain how to sing the melodies that match the symbols. For 20 years, Paul Perper, 85, has taught valley residents, like Leona Mitchell, how to read the Torah in Hebrew. "He's wonderful. He's filled with sweetness and wisdom," Mitchell says. But it's more than two decades of passing down oral traditions that Perper has given Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland. Perper has given the congregation a gift -- his music and style. All of the melodies used to sing the Torah during the Saturday services have been handed down by 85-year-old Perper. "Paul has a variation that has come to be our minhag (custom) of chanting at Temple Emek Shalom; it has become a style that no other community has," says Judy Visser, director of programs and education. "He's invaluable, his years of experience, not just in teaching, but all the melodies and the music he has passed on," Visser says. The sheet music at the lectern in the synagogue is an example. Perper's name is listed as the arranger of the Hebrew blessing. It's the melody used when a person is called up to read the Torah. He's also the reason that more people sing and participate in worship services, Visser says. "One of the greatest praises you can say of a person in a Jewish tradition is that they are a Baal Shem Tov, an owner of a good name," says Marc Sirinsky, rabbi at Temple Emek Shalom. "Proverbs 22:1 teaches that `a good name is worth more than great riches.' Paul Perper's presence in our community makes us very rich because he is a Baal Shem Tov. He has great love and knowledge of the Jewish tradition, of Torah." Perper got his good name -- and his love for the Hebrew language -- from his father, Harry Perper, and his mother, Sarah Esther. His dad emigrated from Russia, his mother from Lithuania, in the early 1900s. They raised their three boys and their daughter in Flint, Mich. Perper said his father was a great student of the Talmud -- the volumes of commentary on Jewish law compiled centuries ago by Jewish sages. "If something came up with us kids, in order to teach a lesson, he would quote from memory a whole section from the Talmud in Hebrew as it was written. It made a great impression on me." As a child, Perper attended Hebrew classes every day after school, learning the language without the luxury of an English translation. He continued studying Hebrew even after his bar mitzvah, meeting weekly in a teacher's home with a small group of students. By the time he was 16, he was a teacher himself. He took voice lessons when he was 20 and began leading the services at his synagogue. His folks spoke Hebrew at home when their children needed the practice. His mother was a closet scholar, having learned while listening to her father, who was a rabbi, teach her four brothers, who became ordained but not practicing rabbis. They all had other occupations. "When I was little, my father and some of his friends would be discussing something out of the Torah and the Talmud and they would be puzzled about something and my mother would come up with the answer, calling it out from the kitchen," Perper says. Perper wanted to teach Hebrew as a profession, but at the time, he knew he couldn't make a living and support his family. He moved to the San Francisco area to work with his brother in a high-volume retail business similar to today's Costco stores. But when he and his wife, Shirley, retired in Grants Pass, Perper began his second career. "I get the satisfaction of seeing my students accomplish what they do," Perper says. "They become more used to the service to follow it and participate in it. Besides the Torah chanting, I teach a Hebrew class for adults who want to learn the language." But Perper is partial to his youngest student, his granddaughter, Rebecca, who is nearly 8 years old. His wife of 46 years, Shirley, passed away in 1994, so his family now is made up of his daughter, Sharon, and his granddaughter. Perper also has a son, David Perper, who works in political science and plays drums on the weekends. He's a former drummer with the band Pablo Cruz. Perper has another admirer, the Temple's rabbi. "It is a great joy to study and learn with Paul," Sirinsky says. "A piece of oral tradition is handed down from generation to generation each time Paul opens his mouth and shares his wisdom," the rabbi says. Yet he adds: "He is very humble and models Abraham in Ezra's teaching that `wisdom begets humility."' Besides his humility, Perper's people skills help make him a great teacher, says student Leona Mitchell, who teaches voice lessons, is the cantorial soloist at Temple Emek Shalom and owns Ashland Camera with her husband, Doug. "He's wonderful. He's filled with sweetness and wisdom," Mitchell says of Perper. "He's patient and kind and when he corrects you, he lifts you up at the same time. He has wonderful stories filled with wisdom that help you towards your goals." Symbols make it possible to recite Torah musically By MELISSA MARTIN ASHLAND -- Paul Perper teaches cantillation, a system of symbols that shows readers how to chant or sing the Torah, the first five books in the Bible. Perper teaches a cantillation system invented in the 10th century by a grammarian in Tiberius, or modern-day Israel. There are 17 to 20 marks that students must learn. Some look like a tiny wishbone, others like an apostrophe, and they appear above and below the Hebrew words in the written version of the Torah. The symbols represent a series of musical notes. They also tell the reader which words to emphasize. "The symbols don't just stand for a melody," Perper says. "They give accents to words and make the sentence or the phrase clearer to understand by the way they are accented and the way of the phrasing." Perper sings the centuries-old tunes onto a cassette tape to help his students memorize the melodies. Besides the trope marks above and below letters, Perper's students must learn the meaning of the dots and dashes beneath the Hebrew consonants. (Vowels were not added until the 10th century.) The Saturday worship services are conducted in Hebrew, but English translations are available in the prayer books in the pews. For Perper's students, the final exam comes during the bar or bat mitzvah service, when the rabbi opens a wooden cabinet called the ark and takes out the Torah scroll, a rolled parchment penned with a quill by a scribe's hand. The Torah is dressed in a velvet mantle decorated with Jewish symbols. Each week in the synagogue, a different section of the Torah is read so that all five books of the Law of Moses are read in a year's time. B'nai mitzvah students must chant the week's Torah portion without the aid of trope or vowel marks, symbols that are not included in the scroll. Perper's students also learn symbols and melodies to chant the Haftarah, the Old Testament books of the prophets, which are chanted after the Torah reading. "There's a long history of chanting the Torah, beginning in 450 B.C.E. with Ezra the Scribe, who initiated the weekly reading of a portion of the Torah to the congregation," Perper says. B.C.E. stands for "before the common era," known to Christians as B.C., or before Christ. "The Hebrew alphabet is the oldest in the world," Perper says. "The Greeks got their alphabet from the Hebrew. The first letter in the Hebrew alphabet is aleph and the second letter is bet. That's where we get our word `alphabet."' Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA