New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)  It was a March evening in 1918. The most famous Jewish voice in America, perhaps in the world, stood backstage at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago.  He was then and there offered a fortune to walk away from shul. They wanted to make him a well-paid star, but it would entail compromising his Yiddishkeit – ever so slightly.

He turned it down.

It was a refusal and a kiddush Hashem that inspired the entire Torah nation.  On his yahrtzeit, today, it is important to understand the man who made that refusal— Yosef “Yossele” Rosenblatt zt”l, the Chazzan whose recordings still circulate a century after his death, and whose life is a monument to the extended argument that a Jewish neshama’s loyalties are not for sale.

He was born on the ninth of May, 1882, in Byelaya Tzerkov, a town in Ukraine whose name means “white church.”  In Jewish memory, however, it was a place of Chassidic shtieblech, batei Midrashim, and the long shadow of Jewish martyrdom.

Music ran in the family the way other families pass down a trade. One great-uncle, Todros, served as chazan in the shul of Skver for seventy-five years and continued leading the shul in prayer even after he went blind in old age, the prayers flowing from his lips by heart. Another relative was praised by his rebbe as carrying “a chord of David’s harp” in his throat. Into this lineage of voices devoted to Avodas Hashem, Yossele was born.

Reb Yossele’s father was an old-fashioned baal tefillah who could do something unusual for a Chassidisha yid of his time: he could read musical notation. He set out to train his son not for the stage but for the amud.

The boy’s gift was apparent almost immediately. As a small child he had already absorbed the entire chazanishe repertoire he heard around him, and by adolescence he was traveling and leading tefilos in communities that crowded the streets outside the shul, straining to hear his voice through the open windows.

When a Viennese voice teacher, a Dr. Bloch, proposed training the young Rosenblatt for the opera, his father gave an answer that his son would carry for the rest of his life: “He was born for the amud, and at the amud he will remain.”

It was not a slogan. It was a decision about his tafkid in life, made by a father about a son, and it held.

America and a Voice the World Wanted

By the time Rosenblatt arrived in America, the path that runs between shul and the concert stage was one he walked carefully. In 1912 he was engaged by the Ohab Zedek shul in New York at a salary of $2,400 a year — the highest an Orthodox shul in America had ever paid a cantor. When the board voted to hire him, its vice-president, Aaron Garfunkel, rose and told the assembled members that he felt proud to belong to a shul that valued a cantor’s midos as highly as his voice. It was character, not merely sound, that the community had decided to purchase.

The voice itself became a phenomenon.

Critics compared him to Caruso; one newspaper called him the only real contender the great tenor ever had. The German-language press in New York wrote that everything that makes a cultivated Italian opera singer was present in Rosenblatt’s singing. When he concertized, halls overflowed. In Chicago in March 1918, hundreds were turned away from the Auditorium, and people who offered ten dollars for a gallery seat could not get one. The streets around the theater, one Yiddish paper reported, were black with Jews streaming in by streetcar, elevated train, and automobile.

One Thousand Dollars a Night

It was at that Chicago concert that the test arrived. Seated in a box was Cleofonte Campanini, general director of the Chicago Opera Association and the impresario who had discovered stars like Rosa Raisa and Amelita Galli-Curci.

He had come at a community worker’s invitation, and the voice on the platform — along with the striking figure of the small, full-bearded man producing it — convinced him at once. As soon as the concert ended he requested an introduction and made his offer plainly: the role of Eleazar in Halévy’s opera La Juive, at a thousand dollars per performance.

Rosenblatt was, by his son’s honest account, taken aback. He had never imagined his talent could carry him to such heights, and the offer was overwhelming — fortune, fame, applause, new worlds to conquer. For a moment, his son wrote, he was carried away and nearly yielded.

But then something settled.

An inner voice told him not to give up the amud for the opera stage, and his father’s words from a quarter-century earlier echoed back to him. He hesitated. It was definitely a nisayon.

Campanini, sensing the conflict, began trying to remove every obstacle. Rosenblatt would not have to give up a single religious principle, the director assured him. He need not touch his beard; he would be given roles in which he could appear exactly as he was. If gentile women as singing partners troubled him, he could be paired with Jewish artists. He could stay at hotels where kosher food would be prepared at the company’s expense. And it would be written into the contract that he need never perform on Shabbos or Yom Tov. Seventeen performances a year, seventeen thousand dollars, plus travel. Every conceivable accommodation.

Reb Yossele listened until Campanini finished.

And then, with characteristic modesty, he raised an obstacle of his own making: his contract with Ohab Zedek had two years to run, and he was not the kind of man who would break his word. This was, his son later admitted candidly, a polite fiction. The shul would almost certainly have been proud to release him. Rosenblatt invented the difficulty so as not to throw a generous and good-faith offer back in the man’s face. He knew from the first instant that he could never go through with it.

Campanini, undeterred, wrote directly to the shul’s president, spelling out every concession he had offered. The board’s reply became famous. They agreed there was no objection to the opera itself from a Jewish standpoint — La Juive is, after all, a story sympathetic to Jews — but they wrote that the cantor’s sacred position in shul did not permit him to step onto the operatic stage.

The nusach of the refusal had been engineered by the man it concerned.

“Some Courage”

The effect was electrifying. From Maine to Florida, from New York to the West Coast, the Jewish and non-Jewish press carried the story of the cantor who had turned down a thousand dollars a night on purely religious grounds.

A Jewish paper in Fort Worth, Texas, ran the story under the headline “Some Courage,” and wrote that if the reports were true, this man was a true Maccabean — they had heard of cantors who left the profession under financial strain, but never of one who refused such an offer because it would interfere with his religious duties.

A Yiddish humor weekly drew a cartoon of Rosenblatt in his silk hat, siddur in hand, fleeing a siren in a gossamer gown labeled “Grand Opera” who chased after him calling, “Come, Yossele — a thousand dollars a night!” In the drawing, Yossele runs straight for shul with the cry of Shema Yisrael on his lips.

A music magazine, Musical America, captured the wider astonishment: in days of stern materialism, it wrote, it seemed almost incomprehensible that anyone would so recklessly discard gold and glory for a belief, a mere tradition.

But to our Yossele –  it was not a mere tradition. It was the whole point.

The Test in Reverse

It is easy to admire a man for refusing money. It is harder, and more revealing, to watch what he does when the money is gone. A few years after the opera offer, Rosenblatt poured his earnings and his name into a Jewish publication called the Light of Israel. He was hoodwinked and had no control over its business affairs and grew uncomfortable with its editorial attacks on major Jewish institutions, and he withdrew.

But the financial damage was done.

By the close of 1924 his house was mortgaged to the hilt, his insurance policies impounded, and a mountain of debt — nearly $192,000, most of it from notes he had endorsed on behalf of the publication — stood against assets of less than $33,000. In January 1925 he was forced into bankruptcy.

Here is the measure of the man. Reb Yossele declared bankruptcy not to escape his obligations but to buy time. In his public statement he insisted that he would, in the course of time, repay every penny, sparing neither effort nor energy.

What pained him most, he said, was not his own ruin but the thought that friends who had trusted him — widows and people of modest means — had lost their savings alongside him. He announced that he would commandeer the only gift left to him, the one thing no creditor could seize: his voice. He would use it to earn enough to free himself from debt.

And he did so on his own terms.

To raise the money, his family turned to vaudeville, the one corner of the entertainment world he had not yet entered. But even in financial desperation, the same lines held. He would not perform near erev Shabbos or Shabbos afternoons — precisely the most lucrative slots, when theaters opened their new shows.

He insisted his act be kept separate from chorus girls, jugglers, and dancers. He stood alone on the stage with a single pulpit before him, a small bearded Jew in a black yarmulke, and sang cantorial pieces, opera arias, and classical lieder. Audiences sometimes sneered when he walked out.

By the time he finished, the reports said, he had “ripped the house apart.”

He had found a way to rebuild his fortune without surrendering a single principle for which he had refused that fortune in the first place. The referee of the bankruptcy court, recognizing the kind of man before him, treated him throughout with unusual deference. It was a Kiddush Hashem that still reverberates in Yiddisha Neshamos.

Charity’s Cantor

Money never had a grip on Reb Yossele, in good times or bad. During the First World War he toured America for the relief of Jewish war sufferers and dedicated to the cause the entire royalties from his recordings — some ten thousand dollars in 1918 alone — and was, by one account, always the first to put a sizable contribution from his own pocket into every collection.

When a Brooklyn benefit concert ran short of cash and the other performers refused to take the stage until paid, Rosenblatt sang his full part without protest and was recalled for several encores; told afterward that the sponsors could only pay him the next day, he said that when a man puts it that way he has to take his word for it, and went home as cheerfully as he had come.

To Die in the Holy Land

Through everything, one longing stayed constant. Rosenblatt loved America and was proud of his citizenship in a land where pogroms were not tolerated. But his lifelong wish was to live and die in Eretz Yisroel — the home, as he put it, of the Jewish people and of the religion of the one God. He poured that yearning into his rendition of the prayers that plead for Jerusalem and for Zion’s return.

In 1933 he sailed for the Holy Land to concertize, his son traveling with him. He asked to be woken the instant the coast came into view.

At six in the morning his son roused him to glimpse Haifa and Mount Carmel, and Reb Yossele came up on deck with tears streaming down his face and immediately began to recite Tehillim. He toured the country, giving some twenty-five concerts. O

n a Sunday in June he told his son, in Yiddish, that when he was no longer in this world the boy should publish the new musical accompaniments he had been developing. His son protested — his father was only fifty-one. No, Rosenblatt insisted, the work would fall to him. That night, in Jerusalem, with his wish to die on the soil of the Land of Israel fulfilled almost to the letter, Yossele Rosenblatt died.

He was buried on Har HaZeisim, the voice stilled at last in the city he had prayed toward his entire life.

I have a suggestion.  Today, in Shmoneh Esreh focus ever more on Viyerushalayim ircha than you ever have before.  Fulfill the answer to the question of Tzipisa liyeshua of Klal Yisroel. Do it for Reb Yossele.  And also, perhaps listen to a nigun of Reb Yossele.

The author can be reached at [email protected]