Cantor Abraham Seif, the ritual circumciser who probably separated more newborn Jewish boys from their foreskins than any other mohel in South Florida history, has died at 86.

Known far and wide as Seif the Knife -- or The Yankee Clipper -- the Polish-born Holocaust survivor learned the delicate procedure in Brooklyn after World War II.

By 1988, Seif estimated he'd done 10,000 circumcisions, yet he told The Miami Herald that he still recalled the first one.

''I fainted,'' he said. ``Everyone does.''

He died on April 21 in Hollywood, where he and Edith Seif, his wife of 57 years, lived with their daughter, Debbie, and son-in-law, Dr. Israel Wiznitzer. A funeral was held.

When he came to Miami Beach's Knesseth Israel synagogue in 1950, Seif was the only Orthodox mohel for hundreds of miles around.

By the time he put down his scalpel in the early 2000s -- having trained a son, Rabbi Howard Seif, and a son-in-law, Rabbi Yitzhak Selmar -- Seif had expanded his territory to all of Florida, Panama, Caribbean, and parts of the world where the locals wouldn't know a mohel from a mojito, like Idaho and Haiti.

Seif circumcised three generations of some families, both of his own sons -- Howard, and Alan Seif, an accountant -- and most of his grandsons.

When families could pay, they paid. When they couldn't, said his wife, he performed the rite anyway. She helped by giving his card to every pregnant woman she saw who might be Jewish.

''He was really considered a gem,'' said Rabbi David Lehrfield, who shared the pulpit with him at Knesseth Israel, 1415 Euclid Ave., for decades. ''He had a God-given voice and knew how to get along with people. The synagogue had 930 seats, and he was able to project beautifully without a microphone.'' Seif's chanting, said Lehrfield, ``had a real European flavor, and being a scholar, he knew what the words meant.''

Lehrfield left for Young Israel of Greater Miami in 1980, replaced by Seif's late son-in-law, Rabbi Yossi Heber, Debbie's first husband.

Though serious about the ritual aspects of a bris -- the circumcision rite -- Seif had a twinkly sense of humor and embraced his vocation's inherently comic elements.

''He's cutting into my business,'' he'd say of son Howard, whose e-mail is seiftheknife@aol.com.

Sometimes he'd declare, ``What I've done today will be proven to perfection when he gets married.''

His favorite mohel joke, according to Howard: A man who needs his watch repaired walks into a shop with a clock in the window. The shopkeeper says he doesn't fix clocks; he does circumcisions.

Customer: ``So why do you have a clock in your window?''

Shopkeeper: ``What do you want me to put in the window?''

''He always played dumb'' when someone told him a joke he'd heard 1,000 times, Howard said. Abraham Seif was born in the city once called Lemberg, now Lvov, and was conscripted into the WWII Russian army. The Nazis killed his parents and 14 siblings.

He sang in a religious choir ''from the time he was out of diapers, and knew the prayers by heart,'' Debbie said. ``He knew what day was Shabbos, and each time he marched in the training lines, my father was singing the melodies from the [prayer book]. Prior to going to bed, he used to stand by the wall and pray the [evening] service.''

In a very real sense, prayer may have saved his life.

'Before they sent his unit to the front lines, they wrote in his passbook that he's crazy: `He talks to himself and talks to walls,' and they refused to give him a gun,'' Debbie said.