There will be a deep dive into an older Jewish culture at the Borscht Belt Museum on March 29 at 2 p.m. The museum is hosting a presentation on “Catskills Cantors” that it can be described as when show biz went to the Shul.

Henry Sapoznik, son of a famous cantor and organizer of the event, described an almost vanished world in an interview with the Shawangunk Journal. Sapoznik is a Peabody Award-winning musician and musicologist.

Cantors are liturgical singers in synagogues. Here in the Catskills there was a show business-style hierarchy around them. The top names moved around a circuit of major synagogues on the East Coast, while lesser names sang in smaller synagogues.

This led to some cantors breaking out to serious market success. Records made by the top names sold as well as those of Caruso the great Italian tenor of the early 20th century. Radio, which was the great media breakout of the 1920s, contributed as well.

Between the two world Wars, “hazzanut” – Cantorial singing performances – were powerful religious events. Yossele Rosenblatt, Gershon Sirota, and Zavel Kwartin were household names in areas with large Jewish populations. Following WWII, the star cantors were lead by Moshe Koussevitsky, Richard Tucker, Frank Birnbaum, and others.

The ranks of ordained cantors were exclusively male in those times but eventually Barbara Ostfeld broke the gender barrier and became a star and today there are many female Cantors. There were female cantors, not ordained in previous decades going back to Julie Rosewald who sang in San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El in the 1880s.

Cantors were a strong component of the culture of the early Borscht Belt. The big hotels featured religious services and for those it was essential to have a great cantor.

“Cantorial singing came in as an organic part of Jewish life,” Sapoznik explained. “Just as the hotels had to be kosher, an important aspect of religious Jewish identity, so they had to offer cantorial singing at their religious services.”

The world Sapoznik described involved intense competition among the hotels over which Cantor they were going to have, especially for High Holidays and Passover. “The reality in those days,” Sapoznik said, “was that the cantors were rock stars.”

In the 1950s, the character of the Borscht Belt was altered by, Sapoznik said, “the influence of the arrival here of Holocaust survivors. Earlier, the anti-immigration legislation had limited the arrival of Jews from Europe. But with the survivors there came a rise in the traditional culture. People like my family came after the war and brought with them a much more centralized literacy about Jewish culture, which had slipped away in US culture.”

Sapoznik grew up with a cantor father, and recalls that he “continued to sing in the Catskills into the ‘70s. He didn’t sing at the biggest hotels, more the second-tier ones.”

The cultural changes in America continued with some surprising elements. Sapoznik said, “Beautiful oratoria synagogue singing was a corner of religious attendance for a century, but it lost favor in the 1960s. The liturgy was no longer sung. Simpler music meant for congregational singing, like hymns in Christian worship, replaced it.”

Sapoznik also notes the rise of popular klezmer music, with its roots in Eastern Europe, but adds that klezmer and cantorial singing “never met up.”

One sign of how Jews were becoming integrated in America arrived in 1960 with the release of Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites, a record for popular audiences that included songs in Yiddish.

“This LP was everywhere you went in Jewish culture,” Sapoznik said. “It was a huge hit. I remember growing up and seeing the same damned LP at every one of my parents’ friends homes.”

There are still cantors, of course. Avi Zablocki, who is still active in the Catskills, will be leading the Passover Seder at Honors Haven this April 1.

Zablocki’s son Yossi runs the Hudson Valley Resort in Kerhonkson. He told us how the famous cantors of the 1980s had an impact far beyond the walls of the synagogues they sang in.

“Dudu Fisher,” he said, “who sang at Kutsher’s from 1982 to 2010, became the biggest name in Jewish music on Broadway. He went on to a lead role in Les Miserables on Broadway, the first time an orthodox Jewish person had a lead role in a Broadway musical. And the twist was that because he was Orthodox, he could not perform on Friday evening or Saturday.”

The event on March 29 at the Borscht Belt Museum will include a presentation and, possibly, some singing.