[1][3] After the end of the war he finished a high school degree, significantly improved his command of Russian and then studied chemistry at the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia in Moscow.

[1][3] During this time he continued to enjoy singing Yiddish informally; however, with a new policy of cultural repression there was little possibility of open or professional performances in the Soviet Union of the 1950s.

[citation needed] With the advent of Perestroika he retired from work as a chemical engineer and in 1992 began to teach Yiddish in a Jewish school "Aleph" in Zaporizhzhia.

He helped found KlezFest in Saint Petersburg starting in 1997; this brought him, his singing ability and his impressive repertoire of folk songs to a wider audience.

[9] Other notable international appearances were at Yiddish Summer Weimar in 2006 and 2009, on a Klezmer Cruise on the Dnieper in 2007, at KlezKanada in 2007 and at the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków in 2010.

[10][11][12] In the early 2010s, the German Klezmer clarinetist Christian Dawid decided to embark on a project to record Gendler's 11 original songs with new arrangements.

Dawid and his collaborators decided that the style of the accompaniment should not be a specifically Jewish or Klezmer one, but rather resembling the cosmopolitan popular music Gendler grew up with, which were reflected in his compositions.