A Soldier’s Voice Rediscovered Sign in to Recommend PAUL VITELLO Published: September 17, 2009 Like many veterans, Max Fuchs did not talk much about what he did in the war. His children knew he landed at Omaha Beach. Sometimes, they were allowed to feel the shrapnel still lodged in his chest. G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times Max Fuchs, 87, in his apartment on the Upper West Side. And once, he had told them, he sang as the cantor in a Jewish prayer service on the battlefield. On Oct. 29, 1944, at the edge of a fierce fight for control of the city of Aachen, Germany, a correspondent for NBC radio introduced the modest Sabbath service like this: “We bring you now a special broadcast of historic significance: The first Jewish religious service broadcast from Germany since the advent of Hitler.” Mr. Fuchs, now 87 and living on the Upper West Side, was 22 that day at Aachen. “I was just as much scared as anyone else,” he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment. “But since I was the only one who could do it, I tried my best.” Well-known in its time, the battlefield service became lost in obscurity, where it might have remained except for an archivist’s chance find and then, fast forward, unlikely fame on YouTube — where the 1944 service has
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/nyregion/18cantor.html?_r=1&hp
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