WEISGAL, ABBA JOSEPH

WEISGAL, ABBA JOSEPH (1885–1981), ḥazzan. Weisgal was born in Poland where his father, the local ḥazzan, was his first teacher. After serving as ḥazzan in Ivancice, Czechoslovakia, he emigrated to the United States in 1920 and became ḥazzan of the Chizuk Amuno congregation of Baltimore, Maryland, officiating for more than 50 years. Joseph Levin, a ḥazzan and musician, wrote a work entitled Emunah Abba about Weisgal's compositions and published it together with those compositions in a volume called Shirei Ḥayyim ve – Emunah (1982). Weisgal was the brother of meyer weisgal and the father of hugo weisgal . (Akiva Zimmerman (2nd ed.)