NEW YORK, NY.- Naftali Herstik, whose soulful, resonant tenor and elegant interpretations of Jewish liturgical music made him one of the most renowned and influential cantors of his time, died Sept. 1 at his home in Ra’anana, Israel. He was 77.

His son Netanel, the cantor of the Hampton Synagogue in Westhampton Beach, New York, said the cause was kidney disease.

In many ways, Herstik was a throwback to the period between World War I and the 1960s, when cantors like Yossele Rosenblatt and Moshe Koussevitzky would fill thousand-seat temples on a Sabbath or a Jewish holiday, drawing connoisseurs eager to hear lyrical prayers delivered by glorious and powerful voices.

Known for his silken-voiced tenor, Herstik had an extraordinary range of three octaves, comfortable in deep bass, the high-C register or falsetto. Equally important was his gift for conveying the emotions of solemn prayers. They were often appeals to the Lord for mercy and sustenance — a sensibility infused by his upbringing as the son of Holocaust survivors — or joyous expressions of gratitude for the biblical miracles.

“Naftali Herstik reminded us that music is the language of the soul, and that a cantor can reach a congregation in ways no rabbi can,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, senior rabbi of the Hampton Synagogue, which held a tribute to Herstik on his 70th birthday in 2017.

Although Jewish law does not require that a cantor (chazzan in Hebrew) lead prayers in a synagogue, many Conservative and Reform congregations, and a few Orthodox ones, hire professional cantors to add flair and grandeur to their worship services. Several cantors, including Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker, have gone on to become esteemed opera singers.

Today, the cantor’s role has been somewhat transformed by an emphasis on intimate prayer groups, increased participation in the singing by congregants and less formal worship, as well as a decline in the audience for classical music.

As an Orthodox Jew, Herstik eschewed performing in full-scale operas, whose tangled romantic plots might have violated some religious precepts. But he gained prominence as the cantor of the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, where he led services for 30 years, from 1982 to 2012. In his time there, every sitting Israeli prime minister, including Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, visited and listened to him sing at worship services.

Beyond the synagogue, Herstik performed both liturgical music and operatic arias onstage. He appeared with the London Festival Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic and the London Mozart Players, and he recorded with the London Jewish Male Choir and the Brno Philharmonic in the Czech Republic.

Herstik, whose family immigrated to Israel after World War II, was a founder of the Tel Aviv Cantorial Institute, a significant training ground for Orthodox cantors, like Yitzchak Meir Helfgot of the Park East Synagogue in New York, as well as for those affiliated with the Conservative and Reform movements.

Although virtually all Orthodox synagogues allow only men to lead worship services, Herstik helped train women to become cantors in the other movements. Today, half the cantors in the 600-member Cantors Assembly, an organization in the Conservative movement, are women, according to Matt Axelrod, the assembly’s executive director. The movement did not allow women to become cantors until 1987.

“He was a cantor’s cantor,” Axelrod said of Herstik. “His rendition of prayer completely reflected the meaning and emotion of the words.”

Naftali Hertz Herstik was born March 24, 1947, in Salgotarjan, Hungary, a onetime mining center 75 miles northeast of Budapest. His family produced 12 previous generations of cantors, his son Netanel said. His father, Moshe Menachem Herstik, survived a Nazi labor camp and was his first teacher of cantorial music; his mother, Chaya (Berkowitz) Herstik, was a survivor of Auschwitz who later worked in the garment industry.

Herstik’s parents returned to Hungary when the war ended but found that Jewish life in their hometown had been hollowed out by the Nazis. They decided to move to Israel in 1950, seeking to help that young country revive the Jewish population after the immense losses of the Holocaust, Netanel Herstik said.

Moshe Herstik served as a cantor in a synagogue on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, while Naftali Herstik studied at yeshivas in the nearby city of Bnei Brak; he sometimes joined his father in leading prayer services. Seen as something of a child prodigy, he started training at age 13 with Shlomo Ravitz, a revered cantor, composer and teacher of liturgical music, at a school in Tel Aviv.

Starting in his late teens, he served as the cantor at a succession of Israeli synagogues — in Acre, Haifa and Tel Aviv — and then worked for seven years at the prestigious Finchley United Synagogue in London. While singing there, he honed his musical craft at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was influenced by the bel canto style of singing, which emphasizes ease and clear articulation of notes and words. At the same time, he absorbed features of the more delicate, less embellished Western European cantorial style, which contrasted with the more impassioned style in Eastern Europe.

Herstik returned to Israel in 1979 to take a position as the cantor of the Heichal Shlomo Synagogue in Jerusalem, at the time the seat of the chief rabbinate of Israel. When a new sanctuary, which became the Great Synagogue, was built next door in 1982, he was appointed its cantor.

In addition to his son Netanel, he is survived by his wife, Elka (Klein) Herstik; another son, Shraga, who is also a cantor; three daughters, Kiki Rosen-Ickovics, Chana Zichel and Idit Temerlies; his brothers, Natan and Chaim Eliezer, who are also cantors; and 21 grandchildren.

After retiring from the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem in 2012, Herstik traveled nine times to Moscow to lead prayers for the High Holy Days at the Chorale Synagogue. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Jews had been forbidden to observe many Jewish rituals, particularly those performed in public.

“My father was facing the challenge of how you lead so many people who are clueless about the Jewish traditions,” Netanel Herstik said. “But my father knew how to do it well.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.