Jean Gornish

Who is Jean Gornish?

Jean Gornish, known as “Sheindele di Chazante", was a chazante, a female performer of Jewish cantorial and liturgical music. She is often called the first woman chazan, although she never served in that capacity in a permanent position in a synagogue.

Jean Gornish was born in 1916. Her father was a chazan in Philadelphia. As a young woman, she had a brief career as a nightclub singer in the northeast, where she playing Lam's Tavern in Springfield, Pennsylvania. Her life as “Julia Cornish” or “Jean Walker ‘The Slick Songbird’” was short-lived; by 1936 she had committed herself exclusively to cantorial music, likely because her parents objected to her singing popular music in public. She took the stage name “Sheindele di Chazante” and began to appear on stage, radio, and records, performing both sacred and popular Jewish music. She appeared on the radio on station WPEN.

She approached her performances with the utmost attention to tradition and detail. Although it was her dream to sing for a congregation, she was respectful of religious tradition, aware that her mere presence on stage pushed up against the limits of Jewish law - even the Reform movement did not train female cantors until the early 1970s. However, Sheindele did take on some ritual responsibilities, conducting the High Holiday choir at Manhattan’s Hotel Astor, leading Passover seders at a number of resorts, and even leading High Holiday services in Philadelphia on more than one occasion.