Funeral services were held today at the Riverside Memorial Chapel for actor and Yiddish commentator on WEVD Radio, Zvee Scooler, who died here yesterday at the age of 85.
Scooler’s career included appearances in plays, movies and the Yiddish theater. He appeared in the entire seven-year Broadway run of “Fiddler on the Roof” and was a commentator on WEVD’s Yiddish program for more than 50 years.
His film career included roles in “Love and Death,” “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” “Hester Street,” “The Wall,” “The Pawnbroker,” “The Chosen,” “The King of the Gypsies,” and “The Detective.”
He appeared in Broadway and Off Broadway in such plays as “Haggada,” and “Memories of Pontius Pilate.”
But Scooler was known by thousands of Yiddish listeners for his weekly program on WEVD, aired every Sunday morning from the 1930’s on. He was known to his radio listeners as the “Gram-Meister” (“The Master of the Rhyme.”)
Born in the Ukraine in 1899, Scooler came to the United States as a teenager in 1912. He made his debute in the first American production of the well-known Yiddish play “Dybbuk” as a member of Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater. He stayed with the theater for 25 years and appeared in numerous plays.
Scooler received last week the Goldie Award from the Congress for Jewish Culture for his contribution to Jewish art and theater.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
