We’ve hired a digital content manager and a production manager – not exactly typical jobs in a synagogue.” “They have invested $250,000 here in technological upgrades. “We have better gear here than at Broadway theaters,” Schwartz says, as we tour the synagogue and reach its control room. Demand during the fall holidays typically outstrips supply: The jewel in the crown at the synagogue is the broadcast of High Holy Day services to hundreds of thousands of Jews in America and around the world, for which the entire building is fitted out with cameras and lighting fixtures and sound equipment. On the High Holy Days it operates two prayer halls (in the main sanctuary, on 87th Street between Park and Madison, and at a venue at 89th Street between Madison and Fifth) and rents out the church next door, as often happens in the city’s interfaith world. The Park Avenue Synagogue has been around for 140 years and constitutes the heart of New York’s large Conservative community. In Israel he has performed, among other venues, at the Knesset, the Yad Vashem Holocaust center and with the Israeli Philharmonic in Tel Aviv. A year later he performed in “The New York Cantors” televised concert, which attracted tens of millions of views in the United States and Europe. He played the part of the cantor in Israeli director Joseph Cedar’s 2017 film “Norman: The Rise and Fall of an American Macher,” starring Richard Gere. In 2016 he sang at an ecumenical prayer session in memory of the victims of 9/11, attended by the pope, among others. He’s appeared at Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, the United Nations and on Capitol Hill. In the New York davening circuit, Schwartz is a bona fide star. Today he is married to Noa, a former Tel Avivian who is a researcher and clinician in the field of rheumatology the couple have four children, ages 3 to 14. Schwartz, 40, grew up in the settlement of Alon Shvut outside Jerusalem and studied in the city’s Netiv Meir Yeshiva. In the Orthodox establishment he comes from, people like him are described as “worse than Christians.” Sometimes they are the target of threats as well. On Rosh Hashanah too he led a service at the grand Conservative synagogue – but accompanied by an orchestra of 50 New York Metropolitan Opera musicians, before a mixed male-female crowd. Azi Schwartz was up on the pulpit last week at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan.
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