Until a few years ago, Mimi Sheffer could not have imagined living in Germany and working as a cantor. Still, Sheffer and her husband, Itzik, left the US and came to Berlin in 1995. Both opera singers, they were hoping to build a career. Despite successful auditions, they both had to work as security guards to make ends meet.

"I left behind an offer for a dream job as a cantor," Sheffer said. "I didn't want it. I turned my back on the US and just wanted to focus on classical music. But the call for liturgical, Jewish music became stronger and stronger and I couldn't ignore it any longer."

After the birth of her son, Shalev, in 1999, Sheffer returned to the stage as her husband became the successor of legendary cantor Estrongo Nachama at the synagogue in Berlin's Pestalozzistrasse.

Music against ignorance

Sheffer also found her calling: To engage in dialogue with Germans via liturgical music. As part of this endeavor, she's organized concerts together with Muslim and Christian singers.

"If you're familiar with a culture or religion, you'll react with less ignorance," she said, adding that music is a very direct and concrete way to approach people.

"They react very strongly," she said.

The emotional power and dramatic expression of opera music and synagogue music is also very similar, Sheffer added. That's why many of the best cantors were at home in both worlds.

Besides, God is present whenever music's present, she said.

Universal sentiments

"Well-known arias, such as those of Tosca or Desdemona, are really prayers," said Sheffer, adding that parallels can be found in Jewish liturgy. "Tosca, for example, sings: 'Why do you reject me in such difficult times,' and then there's a wonderful work by Louis Lewandowski, which is also on the CD, with the lyrics 'Al Tashlichenu,' 'Don't reject us during difficult times.'"

Sheffer has a strong personal connection to one of the songs on the CD.

As a child, her father taught her an unknown melody to Israel Goldfarb's famous synagogue song, "Shalom Aleichem" (Peace be with you). It was composed by Sheffer's grandfather, Abraham Kalb, who worked as choir director in the same Brooklyn synagogue where Goldfarb served as rabbi for more than 50 years.

A divide that's hard to bridge

But after 11 years of living in Berlin, Sheffer has realized that she will never become part of German society. The German side hasn't really responded to her efforts of inter-religious dialogue.

While she likes to invite people for Jewish holidays, others rarely reciprocate. Her suggestions on how to commemorate memorial days to the suffering of Jews under the Nazis were often rejected.

Sheffer, who teaches at Germany's first rabbinical school established after the Holocaust, the Abraham Geiger College, criticized that Germans deal with their past, but remain so caught up in their feelings of guilt that they cannot look ahead and fail to recognize signs of anti-Semitism in the present.

That's why she's quick to respond when asked whether she eventually wants to return to Israel.

"Yes," she said.