In print.

For generations, congregants at The Shaar davened the High Holy Days from three incompatible machzorim, none suited to the congregation's own customs. Zelermyer edited this volume — a project of months of drafts across more than 1,400 pages, arriving a year after the congregation's 170th anniversary — to put everyone on the same page, literally, for the first time in the synagogue's history.

Early research turned up something unexpected: The Shaar's rituals differ, in small but persistent ways, from normative Ashkenazi practice. Koren traced the discrepancies to the congregation's own origins and its ties to Anglo Jewry, and recommended building the volume on Minhag Anglia — the customs of British Jewry — rather than the standard Ashkenaz text. Further research bore this out: the book is grounded in the same British traditions that shaped the congregation at its founding in 1846.

The result carries Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks's English translation and commentary, with further contributions — unique to this edition — from Leon Wieseltier and Ruth Wisse, and abundant transliteration throughout so that congregants of every level of Hebrew fluency can follow and take part.

To be known, from this edition forward, as Minhag Shaar Hashomayim.

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"Printing holy books is in my blood. Drukkerij Levisson — Levisson Printers — of The Hague saved the lives of my maternal grandfather, Benno Levisson, and his parents and siblings, from the horrors of the Holocaust. A bust of my great-grandfather, Levie Levisson, is on display at the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam, together with his printing plates, honouring the generations of my family who produced volumes both sacred and secular in Holland." Cantor Gideon Zelermyer, from the Machzor's introduction

The second of the three volumes, for the late-night service that opens the High Holy Day season — The Shaar's own custom, in Koren's format, alongside the Machzor and Siddur. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Wilfred Shuchat, who led the congregation for longer than anyone in its history.

The daily and Shabbat companion to the Machzor, built on the same principle and the same British-rooted customs — one volume, tailored to The Shaar's own minhag, for the rest of the year.

Judeo-Caribbean Currents

2009 · Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The liturgical tradition of the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel synagogue in Willemstad, Curaçao — established 1654, and the oldest Jewish congregation in the Western hemisphere. Published as volume 22 of the Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel, with liner notes by Edwin Seroussi.

The material was drawn from fifteen boxes of old music in the synagogue's archive, covering nearly a century and a half of practice. Much of it survived only in fragments, and much of it turned out not to be Portuguese at all: local composition, and a great deal imported from western Europe and America. Raymond Goldstein reconstructed and arranged the whole collection for voice and piano. Twenty-eight tracks resulted, among them five settings of Adon Olam, a wedding piece adapted from Lewandowski of Berlin, Bendigamos in Spanish, and a Marcha Nupcial written by the Venezuelan composer Sebastián Díaz Peña for a Jewish wedding on the island in 1916.

Six of the pieces are still sung at Mikvé Israel-Emanuel today.

Zelermyer's mother's mother's mother was Maud Capriles. The line runs back to Dr Joseph Capriles, who married at Mikvé Israel in August 1762, and Capriles descendants have served on that synagogue's board ever since. This is not a visiting cantor's recording of someone else's tradition. It is his family's synagogue.

Shiru Lo Shir Chadash

Two CDs · The complete compositions of Rabbi Cantor Geoffrey Shisler, Book 1

Shisler, a rabbi-cantor in London, had never expected his synagogue compositions to be published. Cantor Arie Subar heard him present them at the European Cantors Convention in London in 2005, thought they deserved a wider hearing, and set about it with Stephen Glass — both Montrealers. The Council of Hazzanim of Greater Montreal published the volume in 2009.

Every piece in the book was recorded by Zelermyer, with Glass's arrangements, and Glass's harmonisations are printed throughout as chord symbols so that the music can be learned by people who do not read notation. The discs are not a selection: they are the whole book, made as a working reference for cantors and baalei tefillah anywhere.

One of the settings, Rachamana, went on to appear on the soundtrack of Labyrinth of Lies.