Brno's most famous synagogue cantor was also an opera singer. His biography is known mainly thanks to the research of Prof. Václav Věžník.
He was born in 1885 in Działoszyce in present-day Poland. He grew up as an orphan without parents, and in order to support himself, he went to the cemetery to sing Jewish funeral songs. His talent and great voice were discovered by chance by the daughter of the local cantor, Shaja Spiwak, and provided the little orphan with a better education. The name Igno is an abbreviation of the name Ignatius, which he used at the time. He studied at the Kraków Conservatory (Konserwatorium Towarzystwa Muzycznego) and then in Germany with Leon Cortelli, which was the Italian-sounding stage name of the cantor and opera singer Leon Hof.
Igno Mann guested in operas in Vienna, Warsaw, Naples, Prague and Brno, and was once referred to as the "Jewish Enrico Caruso". In 1912 he became the principal tenor of the Lvov Opera. From 1927 he worked as a cantor of the Jewish community in Brno.
He fled from Brno to Palestine in the summer of 1939, became cantor of the Great Synagogue in Haifa and trained a whole generation of Israeli synagogue singers. Two of his five children were murdered during the war. He died in 1963 after a long illness and was buried as Yitzhak Mann in the Kiryat Sha'ul cemetery.