“No rabbi at Inauguration; 20-Year Tradition Broken.”
Tough headline in the January 21, 1977, Bnai Brith Messenger.
And accurate.
Indeed, Jimmy Carter was the first president who did not include a prayer by a rabbi as part of the official proceedings of an inauguration ceremony since the tradition began in 1949. That’s when Harry Truman, a Democrat who was Carter’s favorite president, invited Rabbi Samuel Thurman of St. Louis.
But there was more to the story in 1977.
No rabbi for President Carter. But he had someone whom no other president has ever included in an inauguration: a Jewish cantor. A Holocaust-surviving Jewish cantor.
Isaac Goodfriend was born in 1924, the same year as Jimmy Carter. His birth date was January 20. Yes, that means he sang at Carter’s inauguration on his birthday, his 53rd.
Goodfriend was born into a Hasidic family living in a small town in Poland, south of Łódź. At age 16, he was interned at a Nazi labor camp in Piotrkow. In 1944, he escaped from the camp and found refuge at the home of a Polish farmer. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
After the war, Goodfriend moved to Canada. In 1952 he became a cantor at Shaare Zion Congregation in Montreal. He later moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where, for 30 years, he served as a cantor for Ahavath Achim Synagogue.
Goodfriend campaigned for Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. He concluded the 1977 Carter inauguration by singing the National Anthem, accompanied by the U.S. Marine Corps Band. “When I was invited to sing at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration—which I considered to be one of the highlights of my life to achieve, as a survivor of the Holocaust to be asked to sing at a presidential inauguration—Walter Cronkite pushed a microphone in my face before the ceremony started,” Goodfriend told the Georgia World War II Veterans Oral History Project. “How do you feel about singing?’ [he asked.] So I said, ‘I am approaching this very sincerely, like the night before Yom Kippur, the holiest night of the year in the Jewish calendar. My heart is trembling at the same time as I’m rejoicing. And I mean every word that I say or sing.’”
Goodfriend and Cronkite would share more time with Jimmy Carter. They were both guests at the March 25, 1979, White House state dinner celebrating the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.
In November 1978, Carter announced the appointment of 24 persons to the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which aided in creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Cantor Goodfriend was among the appointees. The next year, the commission toured sites in Eastern Europe for historical material to include in the museum. “Isaac Goodfriend, the ebullient cantor of an Atlanta synagogue and singer of the National Anthem at Carter’s Inauguration, also returned without bitterness,” Time magazine reported. “Hidden by Polish farmers, Goodfriend came back 35 years later to the house of his saviors with presents and memories. The family reciprocated—with a lunch of Polish ham. Said Goodfriend, ‘They never did know what kosher meant. But they defined decency.’”
By the way, while there was no prayer by a rabbi at Jimmy Carter’s presidential inauguration, he did have a rabbi participate in his 1971 inauguration as governor of Georgia. The benediction was given by Rabbi Abraham Rosenberg from Congregation Bnai Brith Jacob in Savannah, GA.
And one footnote to the Jimmy Carter/Isaac Goodfriend sliver of presidential history: A Methodist bishop and a Catholic archbishop offered prayers—the invocation and the benediction—at the 1977 Carter inauguration. And since then, there have been an abundance of Christian clergy members praying at inaugurations for Democratic presidents (at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, for instance, Rev. Billy Graham gave two prayers—and no other clergy members did). But since 1977, no Democrat has included either a rabbi or a cantor in the official proceedings of his presidential inauguration ceremony.
(See Cantor Isaac Goodfriend sing the National Anthem at Jimmy Carter’s 1977 presidential inauguration here, via the C-SPAN Video Library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxrfMPaUkFs)
Howard Mortman is the author of When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill, published in 2020 by Academic Studies Press. He is currently doing new research on rabbis participating in presidential inaugurations.
Top image: Jimmy Carter’s inauguration (Credit: National Archives and Records Administration).
Cantor Goodfriend spent many years as the cantor of Community Temple in Cleveland before moving to Atlanta. You totally left that out.