Beloved cantor, police chaplain had a voice that ‘penetrated your heart’

Rabbi, cantor, police chaplain, social worker, naval reservist, tennis pro: Paul Silbersher’s lifetime resume was filled with an impressive range and number of jobs and duties.

The former spiritual leader of Congregation Kol Ami and Temple Sinai died April 26 at the age of 90. He was the first rabbi for both of those congregations.

He came to Kansas City in 1979 after serving in Connecticut and New York for two decades. For the next 21 years, he was the cantor for The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah in Overland Park.

Those who knew and loved him often mention his unforgettable voice.

People who first encountered him in his role as cantor were “understatement — overwhelmed by the power of his voice and the emotional range in his singing,” said Rabbi Michael Zedek, who was senior rabbi at B’nai Jehudah when Silbersher was its cantor.

Capt. James Sutterby of the Overland Park Police Department, where Silbersher was a chaplain for 10 years, echoed Zedek’s sentiment: “He had a voice that when he said a prayer, it just penetrated your heart,” he said.

It’s a good quality for a cantor — a Jewish musical leader — to have.

Ricky Silbersher, the oldest of his four children, said that voice was a key part of his presence.

“As a Jewish spiritualist, I’ve never heard a more sincere and profound voice,” she said.

Silbersher was married three times. Ricky Silbersher said it was his second wife, Sherry Beckman, who helped him decide to move to Kansas City while he was also considering job offers from congregations in Toronto, Curacao and California. He later married former Shawnee Mission School District superintendent Marjorie Kaplan.

The community here became very important to him, and he to it.

“Wherever he went, he created community. … I couldn’t believe how many cards and letters I found of love and endearment and gratitude (in his home),” Ricky Silbersher said. “So many people loved him: layers and layers of people who adored him and he touched in a deep and profound way.

“People felt he was irreplaceable, and he changed their lives.”

One outlet of his desire for community was developing the short-lived Hope Academy charter school in Kansas City. Another was serving as a police chaplain. He felt so strongly about his work as a chaplain that in the last days of his life, he only wanted to wear his department-issued chaplain shirts and requested that one be buried with him.

Another was his commitment to religious, interfaith and social justice programming.

Silbersher was “a colleague who would always embrace the notion of doing more than what they were asked, even if that meant sometimes I had to say, ‘Don’t do anymore,’” Zedek said.

He also loved learning. Silbersher would get up at 6 a.m. to tutor children in bar or bat mitzvah studies before school with “an immeasurable amount of patience,” Ricky Silbersher said. He tutored his granddaughter, Scout, who lives in Australia, for her bat mitzvah via Skype.

“He never stopped learning, and he never stopped sharing learning. He absolutely loved the world of ideas and enjoyed the company of others in that realm. He also was limitlessly engaged in the desire to make connections of the heart — a heck of a combination,” Zedek said.

His daughter said he even wove his passion for tennis into teaching. In the ’60s and ‘70s, he spent many summers as the head tennis pro at clubs in the Northeast.

“He’d teach tennis through the day, then Friday night he’d go to shul — temple — and he’d sing, and Saturday and Sunday, he’d go to Sunday school,” Ricky Silbersher said.

Although he spent a lot of his time on serious pursuits, Silbersher also found a lot of humor in life.

“He could see the absurdity and silliness in lots of situations, could make up a song parody at the drop of a note. He was not a joke-teller. He was just able to see the nuances of what we sometimes refer to as the human comedy,” Zedek said.

A talented mimic himself, one of his own favorites to watch was Mel Brooks’ 2,000-year-old man routine.

“He loved more than anything a good belly laugh,” Ricky Silbersher said. “When he was dying, I played (the Mel Brooks routine) next to the bed. He was really fragile, and he had a laugh — I knew it would hurt — but he let himself laugh so he could feel the laugh in his chest.”

Because of the current restrictions on gatherings, just a couple of family members were allowed to be there when he was buried in New Jersey. Ricky Silbersher said a public memorial service will be held in the Kansas City area on his yahrzeit — the anniversary of his death — next year on April 25.

This story was originally published May 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Beloved cantor, police chaplain had a voice that ‘penetrated your heart’."