A Dignified Exit

Temple Emanu-El, after all, was the largest synagogue in San Francisco and the site of many memorial services of Jewish celebrities and civic leaders.

[additional-authors]

Naomi Pfefferman

May 4, 2000

Dr. Robert Kirschner, program director at the Skirball Cultural Center, received the call not long after Bill Graham’s helicopter smashed into a Marin County transmission tower in 1991. The legendary impresario was dead at the age of 60, and his grieving family and friends needed a rabbi to perform the funeral. Kirschner, then the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, was a natural choice.

Temple Emanu-El, after all, was the largest synagogue in San Francisco and the site of many memorial services of Jewish celebrities and civic leaders. And Kirschner, a former musician who had worked his way through school by playing in bands, was more than familiar with Graham’s contribution to the popular culture. As a young man, he had frequented concerts by artists such as Santana and The Band at the Fillmore West and the Winterland, another Graham venue.

It was Carlos Santana whom Kirschner approached to perform the musical segment of Graham’s memorial service. The impresario had once convinced Santana to adapt a version of a Yiddish melody, and his performance was “so breathtaking that I said a more beautiful benediction had never before been heard in the synagogue,” Kirschner recalls.

Members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane sat next to the rabbi on the dais and spoke of Graham before a standing-room-only crowd of mourners and journalists.

After the service, the rock stars walked out to the grave site, where they listened to the “Kaddish” and watched the casket lowered into the ground. Kirschner had invited a Chabad rabbi to perform the graveside service, as the organization had been a favorite Jewish charity of Graham’s. Musicians such as Grace Slick and Neil Young placed spadefuls of earth on the grave.

Earlier this week, the Skirball hosted an evening on Graham’s Fillmore East auditorium in conjunction with the new play “Bill Graham Presents” at the Canon Theatre. “When they called me about the event, I immediately knew I wanted to do it,” Kirschner says. “I felt I had such a connection to all of that.”