Less than a month before the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust, The Forward published this photo in their August 20, 1939 issue. The headline told of Hitler’s invasion of Slovakia and Nazi hooligan youth enacting pogroms in Pressburg. Another story told of France’s air force newly stocked with 8,000 fighter planes. And another smaller one on that front page told of a ship carrying 700 Jewish refugees refused permission to dock in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city. On a lighter note, below the fold was the magical tale of a local Chicago ‘tramp’ and former apple peddler, who had died in a flophouse leaving behind over half a million dollars.

But the city and The Forward were also hopeful about the 1939 World’s Fair over in Flushing, Queens, and its musical selections to be broadcast by NBC. A music critic for The New York Times who heard the Maazel led concert wrote that Maazel conducted, “with a beat clean and firm, yet elastic and with a consistency of tempo that very occasionally was modified by a nuance absolutely in place and appropriate as it was employed.”

At the age of 11, in 1940, Maazel guest-conducted a radio performance of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, whose studios have been located at Rockefeller Center since the 1930s.

In 1942, a few years after this the Forward published this photo, a year after conducting the NBC Orchestra and only a couple of years before his bar mitzvah, Maazel led the New York Philharmonic for the first time at Lewisohn Stadium, seen here. Born in a Paris suburb into a very musical Ukrainian Jewish family in 1930, Maazel moved to Los Angeles at the age of 5. There, he studied with musician, Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, following him to Pittsburgh from L.A. to continue studying under him. He spent most of his youth there, attending local schools.

Maazel made his conducting debut at the age of eight and by his 20s, he was conducting the Gershwin Concert Orchestra. The orchestra was organized in cooperation with musical legend, Ira Gershiwin, and showcased many of his family’s works. Gershwin, an East Brooklyn native, spent his earliest years here, in the Cypress Hills neighborhood. Maazel worked as a guest conductor for symphonies all over the world before becoming music director of The Cleveland Orchestra in 1972 where he would spend the next 10 years. In the 1980s and 90s, Maazel was the first American to become general manager and artistic director of the Vienna State Opera and later served as the musical director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

In 2002, Maazel took over the New York Philharmonic, whose performance home is Lincoln Center.

There, he premiered several major works and took the orchestra on an unprecedented trip to perform in Pyongyang, North Korea. The office for the North Korean envoy to the United Nations is located on 2nd Avenue and 42nd St., only a block away from the U.N. plaza, seen here. The Forward honored his many accomplishments in his lifetime of creative work: By the end of his life, Maazel had conducted over 150 orchestras in more than 5,000 opera and concert performances. He made more than 300 recordings, including symphonic cycles of complete orchestral works by Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss, winning 10 Grands Prix du Disques. Maazel died at his farm in Castleton, Virginia on July 13, 2014 from pneumonia. Lorin Maazel was a trailblazing Jewish conductor, intrepid and pioneering in his choices. Here's a link to him conducting Marcel Khalife's Arabic Concerto in Qatar.