Background
Sirota Gershon was born in 1874 in Haisyn, Ukraine.
(Dudu Fisher, Gevatron, Ma'apil Kibbutz Trio, Yossele Rose...)
Dudu Fisher, Gevatron, Ma'apil Kibbutz Trio, Yossele Rosenblatt, Dudu Zakai, Eitan Masuri, Effi Netzer Singers, David Katz, Gershon Sirota - 25 Jewish Tradition Songs
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(Gershon Sirota, Mordechai Hershman, Israel Lieb Tkatsch, ...)
Gershon Sirota, Mordechai Hershman, Israel Lieb Tkatsch, Zevulun Kwartin, Ben Zion Kapov-Kagan, Moses Mirsky, David Moshe Steinberg, Joseph Rosenblatt - Chazanim & Chazanut (Cantors & Cantorials)
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Sirota Gershon was born in 1874 in Haisyn, Ukraine.
Sirota began his cantorial career in Odessa.
He served as chief cantor (hazzan) in Vilna (1896-1905) and then, until 1927, at the Tlomacka Street (Great) Synagogue in Warsaw. He possessed a dramatic tenor robusto voice of astonishing range, with an unrivaled coloratura, and the services he conducted were religious musical events that attracted thousands of worshipers. His concert tours of major Russian Jewish communities also brought him to the notice of Tsar Nicholas II, at whose command Sirota gave annual recitals in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.
While in Vilna in 1903, he was invited to make a series of twelve phonograph disks — the earliest recordings of Jewish liturgical music. They included virtuoso interpretations of A. M. Bernstein’s Adonai, Adonai (“The Lord, the Lord”) and of Isaac Schlossberg’s Retseh, which Rimsky-Korsakov numbered “among the elect of synagogue compositions.” Sirota also recorded operatic arias, Yiddish folk songs, and a memorial prayer for Max Nordau.
Sometimes acclaimed as “the Jewish Caruso", Sirota made numerous tours of the United States between 1912 and 1938 and one of Palestine in 1935. A one-hundred-voice male choir accompanied his concert performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1921. The Warsaw Great Synagogue, however, irritated by Sirota’s frequent absences abroad on the Jewish High Holy Days, eventually chose Cantor Moshe Kousse- vitsky as his replacement.
Unlike other great cantors of the time, Sirota remained in eastern Europe and was trapped there after the outbreak of World War II. He is said to have been killed on April 27, 1943 (the last day of Passover), during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
(Gershon Sirota, Mordechai Hershman, Israel Lieb Tkatsch, ...)
(Dudu Fisher, Gevatron, Ma'apil Kibbutz Trio, Yossele Rose...)