In the few months before leaving for Palestine — then still administered by Britain before the state of Israel was declared in 1948 — she studied Hebrew and sewing. But while she was away from Leutershausen, Nazi violence against Jews increased. Her parents hid from an attack and were forced to sell their house and move to Nuremberg. Ms. Jochsberger asked her family to accompany her to Palestine, but they would not go.

She left in early 1939, traveling by train from Munich to Trieste, Italy, and by boat to Haifa. Her mother shipped her piano and other belongings to Jerusalem. After graduating in 1942, she taught music at the Women’s Teachers’ Seminary for Arab Girls in Jerusalem and designed a music curriculum for all Arab schools at the request of the British authorities.

The opportunity to study in Palestine almost certainly saved her life. Her parents were killed in Auschwitz.

She had no siblings and never married.

Ms. Jochsberger continued to teach music in Israel until 1950. But then, imbued with a heartfelt belief that Israeli music could arouse the spirit of Judaism among postwar American Jews, she moved to New York City.

“I felt that New Yorkers were estranged from their Jewishness,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “Only those who studied in Hebrew schools had any relationship with their religion, and the rest had no idea what being Jewish meant. It seemed important, to me, to find a way of creating an emotional attachment between these people and their heritage, and I knew that the way to reach the soul was through music.”

The Hebrew Arts Center started in two borrowed classrooms at the Ramaz School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. About 15 children attended that first Sunday morning; she taught the recorder in one room, and Fred Berk taught dance in the other. In time, she added more classes in piano, guitar and other instruments, and in theater.

To accommodate its growing enrollment, of adults as well as children, the school relocated to buildings on the West Side and finally, in 1978, to the new Abraham Goodman House at West 67th Street, a building that also includes Merkin Concert Hall.