Velvel Pasternak, a leading publisher of Jewish music who recorded and transcribed, and thus preserved, the singular melodies that had typically been passed along by tradition within Hasidic sects, died Tuesday in Oceanside, New York. He was 85.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Gedalia, who said his father had had a cardiac arrest in May and never recovered.

What Alan Lomax did for folk music by traveling the country to record locally cherished but obscure ballads and blues that were in danger of extinction, Pasternak did for Hasidic music, although on a smaller scale. Working out of his Long Island home, tape recorder in hand, he drove to the Borough Park and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn, which have large Hasidic populations, and recorded the mostly unnotated music of the Modzitz, Lubavitch, Bobov and Ger dynastic groups. The works were incorporated in his first book, “Songs of the Chassidim,” published in 1968.

The next year, Pasternak took a sabbatical from teaching at local day schools and flew with his family to Israel, where he visited Hasidic enclaves like Bnei Brak and recorded another batch of songs that had never been published, his daughters Shira Pasternak Be’eri and Naava Pasternak Swirsky said. The music was published as “Songs of the Chassidim II.”

Music in the Hasidic world is an essential part of Sabbath and holiday meals, as well as weddings and other ceremonies, and individual sects may have their own distinctive nigunim, or religious melodies. The songs are generally sung by men, who are forbidden from listening to women singing.

The Modzitzer sect, based in Bnei Brak, Israel, is famous in the Jewish world for soulful melodies, sometimes plaintive and sometimes joyous. Since the early 19th century, almost every chief rabbi of the sect has been esteemed for composing music. Pasternak arranged and conducted the music for the first vinyl recording of Modzitzer songs, whose melodies are prized by even nonobservant Jews.

In addition to the obscure Hasidic melodies, he published some 200 collections of better-known Yiddish and Israeli folk songs, spirited klezmer tunes, Sephardic melodies, cantorial classics, sorrowful songs of the Holocaust and other music.

Pasternak operated his business, Tara Publications — now one of the largest publishers of Jewish music — almost entirely out of the basement of his Cape Cod-style house in Cedarhurst, with his wife and five children taking orders, shrink-wrapping books and mailing them out.

“He was a pioneer,” said Zalmen Mlotek, an authority on Yiddish music and the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene. “He was the first to recognize that all this music, whether it be Hasidic, cantorial, Ladino, klezmer or Yiddish, needed to be available for someone to play it. He felt a sense of responsibility to make the songs accessible.”

Pasternak, a plain-spoken man with a salt-and-pepper goatee and basset-hound eyes, looked on his achievements with mischievous humor. He told lecture audiences how to identify which Hasidic group is singing by whether “yadi-dadi” or “bim-bom” or “yama-mama” is repeated in wordless tunes or passages.

He liked to point out that Hasidic and other Jewish music is subject to influences from the surrounding culture. “Miserlou” was adapted as a melody by the Hasidim of the Bratslav sect, and “Jingle Bells” was turned into a Viznitzer composition, he said.

Working with Hasidim sometimes required flexibility and ingenuity.

In a memoir, “Behind the Music: Stories, Anecdotes, Articles and Reflections,” published by his company in 2017, Pasternak described a tumultuous 1962 recording session in midtown Manhattan with a chorus of Lubavitch Hasidim that featured sponge cake and 192-proof vodka of the kind consumed at the Hasidic gatherings known as farbrengen.

Pasternak scheduled the session for after sundown on a Monday because Tuesday (which officially began the evening before) was an especially lucky day: God, according to the Book of Genesis, on the third day of the week looked upon his creation and twice declared that “it was good.”

He had to improvise quickly when the Hasidim walked out of the building in midsession because a group of leotard-clad ballerinas began rehearsing in a nearby studio. Pasternak managed to persuade the dancers to change rooms.

Velvel Pasternak was born Oct. 1, 1933, in Toronto, where his parents had separately settled after emigrating from small Polish towns. He was a musical prodigy and taught himself to play piano on an instrument his mother had bought for him. His father, Chaim Yosef, a tailor, liked to sing Modzitzer songs at Sabbath meals and take Velvel to a small Modzitzer synagogue. His mother was Chana (Rosengarten) Pasternak.

His parents, who were Orthodox, wanted to give Velvel a more advanced education in Torah and Hebrew, so they sent him to New York to attend Yeshiva University High School for Boys. He considered a career in the rabbinate and enrolled in Yeshiva University’s college division, graduating in 1955. But he realized that he preferred music. He studied at Juilliard and received a master’s degree in music education from Teachers College at Columbia University.

He met his future wife, Goldie Garber, around this time at a roller-skating social event for Orthodox singles. She survives him. In addition to his children Shira, Naava and Gedalia, his other survivors include a son, Mayer; a daughter, Atara Greenberg; a sister, Shirley Halberstam; and 22 grandchildren.

Pasternak liked to tell friends about how he became a music publisher. In 1967, he received a fretful call from the mother of a bride in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She needed Jewish music so that a few friends of the groom who were yeshiva students could dance at the wedding, and she knew Pasternak’s name from records of Hasidic music he had arranged. The bandleader she had hired knew only two songs, the Passover standard “Dayenu” and “Hava Nagila.”

Pasternak transcribed the notes for 15 songs, for which he charged $25. Several months later a Florida family called with a similar request, and he produced another medley, keeping a copy for himself. Soon he was receiving phone calls from other bandleaders who had heard about his transcriptions, and he realized that there was a need for music collections, including sheet music.

Bloch Publishing was willing to print a book if he could prove there were buyers. So he sent out a letter to cantors and musicians that began, “Did you ever hear a piece of Jewish music and wish that someone would write it down?”

He received some 300 yesses. It was enough for Bloch.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.