Joseph Rumshinsky

Along with Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky and Abraham Ellstein, he is considered one of the "big four" composers and conductors of American Yiddish theater.

In Grodno he first saw Yiddish theater (Abraham Goldfaden's operetta Shulamis);[1] and joined the chorus of Kaminska's traveling troupe until 1896, when his voice changed.

In 1899, in Łódź, he was hired as conductor of the new Hazomir Choral Society, studying and arranging folksongs as well as Haydn, Handel, and Mendelsohn oratorios.

[1] Blocked by the union from working in the theater, he taught piano and wrote compositions including a funeral march commemorating the Kishinev pogrom.

The musicians "club," which at that time ruled over the yiddish theater with iron might, treated him like an unwanted guest and barred his way.

[3] At the time, many American Yiddish productions were deemed shund (trash) "that encompassed a world of cheap pulp fiction, common periodicals, and other coarse diversions."

Molly Picon, her husband Jacob (Yankl) Kalich, and Rumshinsky were called "the Three Musketeers of the East Side" in a 1931 New York Times article.

He worked from 1946 to 1949 at Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater, scoring Hershele ostropoler, Isaac Leib Peretz's Dray matones, and Sholem Aleichem's Blondzhende shtern.