Singer Enters a New Stage in Life : Religion: Society entertainer Jeff Carron will take the pulpit as the cantorial soloist for a new reform congregation.

WEST HOLLYWOOD —  Comedian Jackie Mason was a rabbi before he found comedy. And Israeli Rabbi Uri Zohar was a famous comedian, actor and movie director before he turned to religion.

From that tradition comes society bandleader Jeff Carron, entertainer to the stars--and also a cantor for a new reform congregation in West Hollywood.

For 15 years, Carron, 45, has run Jeff Carron Orchestras and Entertainment, putting on extravaganzas for the powerful, the famous and the merely rich. Now he also is a part-time cantorial soloist at Congregation Kol Ami.

“Every Jewish mother’s dream,” said Carron, whose mother and father were so exultant at the news that their son was beginning cantorial studies that they flew to Los Angeles from New York to hear him sing his first services for Yom Kippur. “My mother came out of services that night with her face all red and streaky saying, ‘I should have bought stock in Kleenex,’ ” he said.

Tomorrow night, Carron will sing from the pulpit in celebration of the seventh night of Hanukkah. The service will be at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church, 7350 Sunset Blvd., the congregation’s temporary meeting place.

Kol Ami, whose Hebrew name means “Voice of My People,” has about 120 members. Founded in June, it is the region’s second predominantly gay congregation. Beth Chayim Chadashim in the Fairfax District, founded 20 years ago, is the oldest such congregation in the nation.

Carron has been singing for years for all kinds of audiences, but he says there is something special about cantorial singing.

“I can get up and sing ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ for Merv Griffin and Gershwin for President Reagan where everyone is wearing diamonds and Adolfos and you kind of lose track of what really matters,” he said in a recent interview at his home in Hollywood.

“But when I stood up on High Holy Days to sing Shema, the call to prayer that you sing at every service, it was like, ‘Oh my God, they sang this thousands of years ago.’ I felt so connected to those who went before me. It sounds corny, but that’s how I felt. I kept a photo of my grandparents inside the bima (pulpit). They’re dead but I pictured them there because this would have meant so much them.”

Carron still makes his living as a commercial entertainer, singing with small ensembles and large orchestras, staging theme parties that range from simple and elegant to the outer limits of weird. There are beach parties replete with singing mermaids, ski-theme parties with Swiss yodelers and faux snow, offbeat Christmas parties that include a circus act, mimes, comedians, a 14-piece orchestra and Carron belting out in Bruce Springsteen-style rock: “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.”

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Carron attended the High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and studied communications at Ithaca College, taking private music lessons throughout his life. He got what he describes as on-the-job-training as a bandleader in New York and moved to Los Angeles in 1977 to open his business.

Although he doesn’t consider himself religious, Carron said finding a religious setting in which to pursue his first love--singing--has invigorated his interest in Judaism and renewed his commitment to Shabbat services. Before he began his cantorial studies, he said, he was a High Holy Days-only attender.

“I don’t walk around with a yarmulke on my head all the time and I work on Friday nights when I have a job,” he said. “But in my heart and life I am spiritual.”

Carron is years away from becoming a full-fledged cantor--that can take four to five years of religious study. But so far, he tas taken religious training, including classes in Hebrew, at the University of Judaism, voice training with Cantor Judy Fox and prayer study with Congregation Kol Ami’s rabbi, Denise Eger. He studied the musical motifs particular to the High Holy Days, Shabbat and Hanukkah for three months each before feeling confident enough to boom them from the pulpit.

Rabbi Eger is pleased with her new cantorial soloist. “I think that Jeff, an entertainer who’s in touch with people and whose job it is to make people’s parties as fun as possible, can bring that same touch to the pulpit,” she said. “I asked him to be our cantor because of the special warmth he exudes and because he has the right Jewish neshamah (soul).”

Cantor Fox says Carron has been a good student.

“He really has a feel for the idiom of Hebrew songs and he sings with Jewish soul and heart,” she said. “It goes without saying that he is a fabulous entertainer with a powerful voice, but he also has a very good feel of where to stop his entertainment skill and present himself in a service setting.”

For Carron, who is billed to play with Peggy Lee for New Year’s Eve at the Beverly Hilton, the thing is the singing: both in his secular and spiritual life.

“Singing is all I ever wanted to do since I was 3 years old,” he said. “And there is a lot of entertainment in the services. So guess what--it carries over onto the pulpit.”