First Roumanian-American Congregation - "Cantor's Carnegie Hall"

"Cantor's Carnegie Hall"

The synagogue's sanctuary had a high ceiling and "opera house" characteristics, and was renowned for its "exquisite" or "magnificent" acoustics. Known as "the Cantor's Carnegie Hall", First Roumanian-American became a center for cantorial music, and many of the greatest cantors of the 20th century led services there. Yossele Rosenblatt, Moshe Koussevitzky, Zavel Kwartin and Moishe Oysher all sang there, as did Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker before they became famous opera singers. Having a reputation for good cantorial singing had a positive impact on a synagogue's finances; congregations depended on the funds from the sale of tickets for seats on the High Holy Days, and the better the cantor, the greater the attendance.

Red Buttons sang at the synagogue with Rosenblatt in 1927, and when visiting the synagogue almost 70 years later could still remember the songs. Though his family actually went to a "small storefront synagogue", Buttons was discovered, at age eight, by a talent scout for Rosenblatt's Coopermans Choir, who heard him singing near the intersection of Fifth Street and Avenue C, at a "pickle stand". Buttons would sing in the choir for three years. Eddie Cantor has also been claimed as a choir member, though this is less likely.

Oysher—"the greatest of all popularizers of cantorial singing"—became the synagogue's cantor in 1935, and the congregation's membership peaked in the 1940s, when it numbered in the thousands. In a 1956 interview by Brendan Gill in The New Yorker magazine, Oysher described First Roumanian-American as "the most orthodox Orthodox synagogue in town". Oysher died of a heart attack two years later "at the young age of 51". The week of his death, he had said, "half-jokingly", that he wanted only one person to deliver his eulogy: Chaim Porille, rabbi of the First Roumanian-American Congregation. Porille had been born in Uscieczko (then in Poland) in 1899, and moved to the United States in 1927, to serve as rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Providence, Rhode Island. He became rabbi of First Roumanian-American in 1932, a post he filled until 1962, and was a member of the executive board of the Agudath Harabonim. He died in September 1968.