Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzhak Meir Helfgot. Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco

Itzhak Perlman has left the building for Florida’s west coast, where he’ll be working in Sarasota for two weeks with talented young string players in the Perlman Music Program.

But even though he’s done with the three recitals he gave this week in West Palm Beach and Miami (last night at the Knight Concert Hall), he made some news yesterday by announcing his return to the area this March for two appearances with the Festival of the Arts Boca, now in its eighth year.

The great Israeli-born violinist has appeared at the festival before (once as a conductor of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony), and while he’ll be doing his regular thing by playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on March 6, three nights later he’ll be doing something a little different that is near and dear to his heart.

On March 9, Perlman will present Eternal Echoes, a program of Jewish liturgical and traditional works in which the violinist will collaborate with Cantor Yitzhak Meir Helfgot, who is the chief cantor at the Park Avenue East Synagogue in New York. Their collaboration resulted in a Sony disc last year called Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul.

Perlman has said he wanted to do a record of “Jewish comfort music,” the sounds of Jewish life that are familiar to him from his earliest days. Helfgot and Perlman will be accompanied by a klezmer and a chamber orchestra, with arrangements done by Hanus Netsky of Boston’s New England Conservatory.

The songs on the record, which presumably will be on the Boca program, include the familiar Yom Kippur prayer Kol Nidrei and the Sabbath prayer Sheyibone Bays Hamikdosh, klezmer folksongs and Shoyfer Shel Moshiakh, a song by the Yiddish theater pioneer Abraham Goldfaden.

In a press release sent out by the festival, Perlman was quoted as saying that this music is filled with history. “For me, every little musical groan or sob that happens is Jewish history. It makes you think.”

The Festival of the Arts Boca, which runs from March 6-15 in the city’s Mizner Park Amphitheater, can be reached at 866-571-2787 or by visiting www.festivaloftheartsboca.org.

News of the Perlman concert comes as the sixth annual Winter Jewish Music Concert, organized by Alan Mason, prepares for its Jan. 18 return at the Bertha Abess Sanctuary in Temple Israel of Greater Miami, where Mason is director of music.

The concert always sells out, and features a large selection of Jewish music in a variety of genres including jazz, pop, classical and klezmer. Tickets for that event, which are $18, can be had by visiting the site.

South Florida is the third-largest Jewish center in the United States, after New York and Southern California (according to the Jewish Demography Project at the University of Miami), and these programs will doubtless reach a large and faithful audience.