The sounds — and sights — of cantorial virtuosos will fill the halls of The Jewish Center in Princeton this month, as Cantor Murray Simon premieres his new two-disc DVD set that includes Great Cantors of the Golden Age and Great Cantors in Cinema.

The free community event is set for Sunday, Jan. 28, at 3 p.m. at the synagogue in Princeton.

The just-released DVD set, produced under the auspices of the Rutenberg and Everett Yiddish Film Library of the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University, represents the culmination of an 18-year quest for Simon.

Simon researched, restored, and recaptured film footage of the giants of traditional hazanut, the Eastern European cantorial art that enthralled the American-Jewish community during the first half of the 20th century.

“To me, it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do it. It doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Simon said as he relaxed in his office at The Jewish Center, where he will soon celebrate his 10th anniversary.

“I think this will be a major, major contribution to this precious cantorial art, and it will add to the prestige of this art form, which is indigenous to the Jewish people,” he said. “I feel that’s my legacy and my labor of love.”

Simon began this labor in 1989, when the National Center for Jewish Film contacted him with the news that it had just acquired materials from the estate of Yiddish film director/producer Joseph Seiden, including rare, historic footage from his 1931 film, The Voice of Israel.

“Heretofore, no one remembered seeing cantors from the so-called ‘golden age.’ No one even thought of them being on film,” Simon said. “When I saw it, I got very excited. This was like discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls in terms of cantors.”

But Seiden had captured his subjects on highly flammable, unstable nitrate film, according to Simon. “The fact that it was preserved as well as it was was a miracle,” he said. “I said, we have to restore these films and put them in a format people will be able to see today. That was a big, big undertaking.”

By 1990, Simon had produced the first of two landmark videos — Great Cantors of the Golden Age, featuring such virtuosos of hazanut as Yossele Rosenblatt, Joseph Shlisky, Mordechai Hershman, Adolph Katchko, and David Roitman. Three years later, he brought out a second video, Great Cantors in Cinema, with Rosenblatt, Hershman, Moshe Koussevitsky, Moishe Oysher, and Leibele Walman.

“This was a tremendous, tremendous historic product that really preserved a very important part of our heritage,” Simon said. “I was very proud of the product. In effect, I not only restored this treasure, but I made it available to the general public.”

But the project was far from over. In 2004, the National Center for Jewish Film contacted Simon again with a proposal to ensure the survival of the archival footage by transferring it to the state-of-the-art DVD format. “I said, I don’t just want to transfer them to DVD and call it quits,” Simon said. “Maybe there are more materials out there I could still include.”

Thus began a quest for archival film that took Simon to the Library of Congress in Washington and the Milken Foundation in Los Angeles. “I followed all kinds of leads and came across a few hot tips,” he said. Ultimately, he found seven more film clips, including some featuring private performances by Rosenblatt and Koussevitsky. All were integrated into the new, digitally restored, two-and-a-half-hour DVD set.

Valuable as education, as history, and as entertainment, the new set showcases a religious art form that flourished in an era when congregational members had the time and the inclination to simply sit back and listen, Simon said.

“I think it was the ability of the hazan, through his beautiful voice and vocal techniques, to enhance the prayer and bring out not only the meaning of the prayer but the emotional content,” he said. “It was done in such a way that it was an inspiration to those who listened to it. The more the cantor poured himself into the prayer, the better they liked it.”

Great Cantors of the Golden Age and Great Cantors in Cinema is being issued at a time when the power of classical hazanut is enjoying a renaissance, Simon added.

In November, the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary and Reform Judaism’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion cosponsored a conference on cantorial music’s “golden age.” Last month, 4,000 listeners attended a concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York featuring hasidic Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot and members of the New York Philharmonic. This year, Jewish film festivals have been screening A Cantor’s Tale, a documentary about the cantor and preservationist Jack Mendelson.

Simon hopes his DVDs add to the revivalist spirit.

“Now that it’s been produced, I really think it’s going to sell very quickly,” the cantor said. “It is preserving a very important part of the cultural history of the Jewish people. It’s not only a testament to my profession, but it’s a historic preservation that would otherwise have been lost forever.

“That’s why I’m so proud of this,” he said. “It’s preserved now for everybody to enjoy.”

Visit the Web site for more information about Great Cantors of the Golden Age and Great Cantors in Cinema. Copies of the DVD set will be available for purchase at the Jan. 28 program. For information, call 609-921-0100.