Everyone knows the biblical Miriam played a crucial supporting role in the Exodus, but few are aware that the 8-year-old who portrayed her in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille classic The Ten Commandments grew up to be a cantor.

“I feel like Miriam inspired me,” said Cantor Riselle Bain, sole spiritual leader of Temple Israel of Highlands County in Sebring, Florida.

At 4’11” and weighing 88 pounds, Bain isn’t much bigger than when she sent baby Moses down the Nile in a basket and, like the biblical figure, she took her time becoming a leader of her people.

Growing up in Los Angeles during Hollywood’s Golden Age, Bain followed her father, Abie Bain, a former boxing champion turned actor, onto the silver screen, singing, dancing and acting with stars like Bob Hope, Buster Keaton and Judy Garland. She later appeared in multiple stage productions of Fiddler on the Roof and as Eva Peron in the second national tour of Evita.

She was in her early 40s when her rabbi, Barry Altman of Temple Beth El in Ormand Beach, Fla., asked her to fill in for a sick cantorial soloist. “I couldn’t even read Hebrew,” Bain admitted, but “he ignited the match” when he said after the services, “I think you missed your calling.”

From there, Bain returned to school for a music degree, then Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s School of Sacred Music, where she was ordained as a cantor in 2006.

Describing the difference between theatrical and liturgical singing, Bain said, “In theater, you take something unreal and try to make it real. When you’re praying, it’s a real moment; it’s real people.” And yet she is aware that she has touched exponentially more people as Miriam.

For many Jews, watching The Ten Commandments is as much a part of their Pesach observance as Miriam’s cup, and Bain embraces that. “It’s gratifying because I’m part of something that has endured,” she said. At the same time, she notes that the film—like the Bible itself—comes with a dose of patriarchy.  

Bain, a Hadassah life member who performed at the Florida Hadassah Centennial celebration in 2012, laments the fact that the adult Miriam’s song at the sea never made it into the film.

“Miriam didn’t get her rightful place in Torah, and she didn’t get it in The Ten Commandments,” she said. “Maybe a woman needs to make a film about Miriam—Miriam the Prophetess?”

And who better to play the grown-up version than Bain herself?” 

Avi Dresner