But this time, the Jewish kind. A fascinating look at the history of cantors in synagogue services – and their American heyday.

In early December, a bearded Hasidic Jewish man stood before a sold out crowd at Lincoln Center and delivered a concert of melodies that are normally heard only within the confines of a synagogue. The star of the show, Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, is an Israeli who was recently given a lucrative contract by Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue to serve as the chief cantor–a role that condenses the power of the church organ and the delicacy of the church choir into one male voice.

Mr. Helfgot’s appearance at Lincoln Center recalled an earlier, mostly forgotten era of cantorial music, during the 1930s and ’40s, when cantors were the celebrities of Jewish life. A new documentary film, "A Cantor’s Tale," warmly portrays a time when Broadway producers would try to lure big-name cantors out of the pulpit and into the footlights.

Mr. Helfgot’s concert and "A Cantor’s Tale" are two signs of a resurgent interest in the star turn taken by hazzanus, as cantorial music is known. But they are also a sort of reminder to Jews of a grand tradition that has largely been left behind, replaced by a new, more democratic, but decidedly less glamorous approach to Jewish music.

At the center of that lost world were men like Yossele Rosenblatt, Moshe Koussevitzky and Mordecai Hershman, tenors who were household names in Jewish Brooklyn. Hershman, like the other great cantors, began his life in Eastern Europe as an orphan in a Russian shtetl. From the Great Synagogue in Vilna, he was lured to America by Temple Beth El, in Brooklyn, which built a new synagogue to fit the crowds that came to hear him