Joseph Rumshinsky

Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1956) was a Jewish composer born near Vilna, Lithuania (then part of Russian Poland). Along with Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky and Abraham Ellstein, he is considered one of the “big four” composers and conductors of American Yiddish theater. Biography Joseph Rumshinsky’s mother taught singing to local singers and badkhonim (wedding entertainers). As a child, he studied with a cantor. At the age of eight he was called “Yoshke der notn-freser” at the music school where he studied piano. He traveled until 1894 with various Hazzanim. In Grodno he first saw Yiddish theater (Abraham Goldfaden’s operetta Shulamis); In 1897 he became choir director for Borisov’s Russian opera/operetta; in 1888 he conducted a full production of Goldfaden’s Bar Kokhba. In 1899, in Łódź, he was hired as conductor of the new Hazomir Choral Society, studying and arranging folksongs as well as Haydn, Handel, and Mendelsohn oratorios. He studied with the Polish musician Henryk Meltzer and at the Warsaw Conservatory. In 1903 he left for London to avoid conscription in the czar’s army. At the time, many American Yiddish productions were deemed shund (trash) “that encompassed a world