Gershon Kingsley was born Goetz Gustav Ksinski on Oct. 28, 1922, in Bochum, Westfalia, Germany. His father, Max Ksinski, was a carpet dealer and pianist; his mother, Marie Christina, was a homemaker who converted from Roman Catholicism to her husband’s religion, Judaism.

He grew up in Berlin, but in 1938, a few days before Kristallnacht, he fled to what was then Palestine and later became Israel. (His parents reached the United States by way of Cuba.) Mr. Kingsley farmed on a kibbutz and served in the British colonial army in Palestine. He also taught himself to play piano and attended the Jerusalem Conservatory.

He went to the United States in 1946 and studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music (now the California Institute of the Arts). He was a musical director for Los Angeles synagogues and a conductor for summer stock theater in Sacramento. He chose the name Gershon after the son of Moses; Gershom translates as “stranger there.”

Mr. Kingsley moved to New York in 1956 and became a conductor for Broadway and Off Broadway theater. He was the musical director for Laurence Olivier in “The Entertainer,” for Josephine Baker concerts at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway, for a 1964 revival of Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” for the Robert Joffrey Ballet, and for a television special with Lotte Lenya, “The World of Kurt Weill.”