"When you work on a piece of music you never know who will listen and who will be affected. I learned this at the very beginning of my career” Arranger Yoeli Dikman reflects. Seven years ago the young musician was in America conducting a concert at Brooklyn College with Yosef Chaim Shwekey. “We went to daven Minchah when an elderly man came and asked me if I’m Yoeli Dikman. In broken Hebrew he told me how he had been a conductor of classical music many years ago but left it when he became a baal teshuvah. Since then he could rarely bring himself to listen to music. His grandson had shared the song ‘Kol Yisrael ’ which I arranged for Yosef Chaim on the Chavivim album thinking that the classical style arrangements might just be to his taste and this old man was so overwhelmed that such arrangements actually existed in chassidic music. He couldn’t stop thanking me for my work. It was a very moving encounter.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 688)