At the time, secular music was turning from the ballads of the 1940s toward the rock and roll of the ’50s and ’60s. The agitated rhythms and inappropriate lyrics were offensive to Orthodox sensibilities; Beatlemania, with its long-haired men and screaming groupies, loomed on the horizon. Guitar was considered verboten, David Nulman recalls, because those entertainers who introduced it played it in vulgar ways. “I knew one guy who used to put his guitar in a paper bag to hide it,” he says.

Whistling in the Dark

The young men in the above picture had never given any thought to playing music professionally. They were first and foremost Pirchei boys, and music was simply a part of the Pirchei experience.

Shmuel Boruch Bagry, a nephew of Mike Tress, first met Eli Teitelbaum when Bagry was a nine- year-old camper and Teitelbaum a 15-year-old counselor at Camp Agudah. “He was playing the harmonica over the loudspeaker, and it sounded like an accordion,” Bagry recalls.

Teitelbaum wasn’t a top-tier musical talent, but he was a genius when it came to launching revolutionary initiatives in the Jewish community, be it Jewish music, Dial-a-Daf and other dial-up shiurim, or Camp Sdei Chemed. In addition, he was a natural leader with a charisma and maturity that ensured the boys followed him devotedly.

“He was a big brother to all of us,” Bagry says. “We adored him. He never lost his cool, he helped us grow up. But he was also ahead of his time, a miracle maker, like a Steve Jobs of Jewish music.”

It was Eli Teitelbaum who had the idea to bring Pirchei boys together to play instruments. The goal was simply to have fun, not to get to Carnegie Hall; what they lacked in skill, they made up for in enthusiasm. “Eli would put together these ridiculous groups,” David Nulman remembers. “He’d have two accordions, or two drummers. What band needs that? But we didn’t care — nobody had any illusions of being Jascha Heifetz.”

In fact, when Nulman and his friends did hear a Heifetz recording and realized just how far they were from that level of virtuosity, they’d console themselves by joking, “Fine, he does nice Mozart, but can he play ‘Od Yishama’?”

“But the truth is that Mozart doesn’t play on your heartstrings the way Jewish music does,” Nulman feels compelled to point out. “It doesn’t express the Jewish past and future.”

The composition of the Pirchei band shifted depending on who was around, and the boys would take turns leading it. With no pretensions to virtuosity, no one could be a diva; with no profit motive, there were no politics.

“It was simply a communal effort to produce simchas hachayim,” Nulman says.

Bagry adds, “We just loved the music and the camaraderie. We were a chevreh of friends who really loved being together.”

Back then, bands didn’t include a singer; instead, audiences typically sang along. The “sound system” usually consisted of a single mike in front of the entire group. An accordion stood in for a keyboard.

Many of the boys didn’t even have their own instruments; they rented them or procured them secondhand from relatives. Nulman got his accordion as a bribe from his father, who wanted him to recite his bar mitzvah pshetel in Yiddish. Bagry’s father rented him an accordion from the Sam Ash store. “Later I bought a better one — it was called a Cordovox, the Rolls Royce of accordions — and my father helped me finance it.”

Nulman was inspired by Shlomo Carlebach to learn the guitar. “Carlebach wasn’t a great musician, but he was a great composer,” he comments.

Yisroel Lamm started on the trumpet in Camp Agudah. His roommate’s best friend was Sruli Teitelbaum, Eli’s brother, who’d taken up the trumpet but was losing interest. Yisroel began playing around with it, and found he liked it: “It was my entry into music,” he says. After that, he found a trumpet in a family closet that had belonged to his grandfather during World War I.

He took it over, so his brothers had to find other instruments to play: “I learned the clarinet and our brother Yitzchok played saxophone and flute,” Michoel says. “We didn’t take lessons then, we were self-taught. Yisroel taught himself to arrange music from reading books.” At one point, some of the old-time klezmer musicians took it upon themselves to help the boys advance their technique.

The boys didn’t lavish many hours on rehearsing — in fact, often they rehearsed on the job. They’d play at Pirchei events in Boro Park and Queens, at camps, at hachnasas sefer Torahs, at Melaveh Malkahs and simchahs — in short, at any Jewish event that needed enlivening. “Once we jumped in a car and went to play in Chicago,” Nulman recalls. “Our parents wondered how that happened.”

Nulman remembers that the band would play according to the neighborhood they were going to. “There was one kind of music for a Pirchei Melaveh Malkah, another kind for a Williamsburg Melaveh Malkah,” he says. “Lakewood didn’t want Carlebach tunes, and Williamsburg didn’t want music with syncopation. Usually one of the guys would be from that neighborhood, and would teach the rest of us the music we needed to know.

“What you wore was also very important,” he continues. “You needed a large black yarmulke for some crowds and a knitted one for others. If you wore the wrong one, people wouldn’t sing along.”

Pirchei activities also included some early outreach efforts: Teitelbaum’s boys would sometimes go to public schools and play for Jewish students. At that time the official director of Pirchei was Rabbi Josh Silbermintz, a third-grade rebbi at Toras Emes, along with Teitelbaum and Pinky Belsky.

“Josh, as he was affectionately called, was a hero who inspired thousands of boys,” comments Rabbi Yosef Chaim Golding, who worked for Agudath Israel in various capacities for over 30 years and is today CEO of Misaskim. He recounts that Silbermintz wanted to organize the first major siyum mishnayos for Pirchei, and in addition hoped to send some of the public school recruits to frum camps. The problem was that there wasn’t any money.

In those days Shmuel Boruch Bagry was learning in the Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn, where he met Alan Jakow, a producer of chazzanus records. Jakow suggested the Pirchei band might want to cut an LP, and the sales could help fund Pirchei projects.

“I approached Eli with the idea,” Bagry relates. “For us, it was a fantasy! Us, make a record?! But Eli got excited by the idea. He was more mature than me, and was able to get the process in motion.

“We hired Stanley Sperber to be the arranger. It was the first time we had an actual arranger — I couldn’t even read music then. I played by ear, and just knew chords pretty well.” There would be a Pirchei choir singing along.

Nulman avows that those early recordings didn’t sound so great. “We got real musicians to play up front, and the rest of us played in the back,” he says. “The choir was all Pirchei, but most of the band consisted of professionals with the rest of us making noise in the back.” In fact, Greebel says the first recording was so poorly arranged that the entire instrumental track had to be redone. But the first Pirchei record back in 1964 was so successful it led to a series of others, and it garnered notoriety for the band.

Even if the musical standards weren’t the highest, the spiritual ones remained so. “Rabbi Moshe Sherer had to approve all the Pirchei records,” Landesman says. And Eli Teitelbaum made sure the yeshivah boys didn’t stray from their hashkafos. “It was his policy we wouldn’t play for mixed dancing,” Bagry recalls. “We couldn’t sully our name as Pirchei boys.”

As the band gained popularity and the LPs were released, the group found themselves sought after to play for simchahs and events. “Some people actually had the temerity to offer us money for it,” Nulman laughs, “but we were the only game in town besides the old European klezmers. It was thrilling — we were doing something no one had done before. It gave us our wings.”

“In hindsight,” says Yisroel Lamm, “It took a certain audacity to get up there with no training and play for people. I remember Eli asking me to come play at a wedding when I was still a beginner. But people had no expectations, so we could get away with it. What did the oilem know? They were happy to see someone with a yarmulke playing with a band.”

The band filled a void, Bagry says, and that created lots of momentum. “It was bigger than us,” he says.

He recalls that getting paid was very validating; it made the bochurim feel grown up. As time went on they even learned they could ask — respectfully, as befitted yeshivah bochurim — for amenities like free meals at weddings.

For many, the money was welcome. The Lamm brothers, for example, came from a family of ten children. “It was a brachah for many of our parents,” Michoel Lamm says. “At ages 17 and 18, my brothers and I were financially helping out our parents, and they felt proud that people saw their children as talented.”

Nulman remembers his parents feeling a mixture of pride and bemusement: “They were quiet people, not used to being in the public eye.”

Becoming “professional” introduced new complications, like pressure to join a union. Bagry recalls a union rep showing up at a simchah in the hall of a Talmud Torah where the guys were playing. The rep went straight to the caterer and threatened to shut the place down.

“Even the waiters would give us a hard time if we weren’t union members,” Michoel Lamm says. “The wall outlets for the mikes would suddenly stop working.”

Rabbi Greebel claims to have been the first to join Local 802, “even before Yisroel Lamm,” he says. Today, the union scene has evolved tremendously; many Jewish musicians belong to the union and are grateful for the benefits it provides.

While gigs mostly came from word of mouth, the band did take out a few ads in the era’s only Jewish English-language newspaper, the Jewish Press. Demand for frum orchestras grew exponentially. “In those days, during the month of June, if you could sneeze in D minor, you had work,” Greebel remembers.

The guys even progressed as musicians. “We did it backwards,” Nulman says. “We just started playing and got training later down the line.” Michoel Lamm didn’t take a lesson until he’d been playing for ten years.

Some of them continued to play for many years after they’d married and had children. “We became quite professional as amateurs go,” Bagry says. “But eventually we became real professionals.” The “young buds” of Pirchei transformed into a flowering of Jewish music.

So where are these boys of yesteryear?

Most of them didn’t continue in music forever. Michoel Lamm continued playing for about 20 years, even after going to law school, but after his fourth child was born, the musician’s late hours didn’t mesh well with family life or having to appear in court at 9 a.m. He still plays clarinet and sax at family events.

Motel Landesman became a malpractice lawyer and moved to Lawrence. Shmuel Boruch Bagry spent some time in college and then went to work in his father’s hosiery business; five years ago he went back to full-time learning in Lakewood. “Someone gave me an accordion, and sometimes I’ll play for the yeshivah guys,” he says. “It’s like riding a bike — you never forget.”

Greebel, a drummer and trumpet player, played for some years, making an album entitled Yeshiva Brass in 1969 with fellow player Motty Parnes a”h, who was a joint composer with Itzy Weissberg of some early Pirchei hits such as the famous “Ani Maamin” (Pirchei Volume III, released in 1968) and “Pischu Li” (from Volume II, released in 1966). Parnes, remembered by his friends for his guitar playing and sense of humor despite being a yasom, had to go out to work and didn’t stay long with the group. Greebel served as a rebbi in Atlanta for some years, then became a pulpit rabbi in Belmar, New Jersey. He has since retired.

Chaim Fessel, whom Nulman remembers for his “gigantic repertoire,” became a yeshivah principal at Torah Vodaath and Novominsk and served as the baal korei at the Zakheim shul in Flatbush for 45 years. Yossi Leshkowitz (not in the photo), who had “tons of melodies in his head,” according to Nulman, became a successful accountant.

Elliot Frankel lives in Cedarhurst, according to Landesman, but we were unable to locate him. Saxophonist Feivie Mendlowitz, a grandson of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, fell out of contact with the others; so did Josh Goldberg, a baal teshuvah who’d attended Penn State and had real musical training. Goldberg became an engineer and worked for the Rand Corporation, and is now retired and learning full time. Greebel last saw Goldberg about 25 years ago, when he still lived in Atlanta. “He was in some tech business and was in town for a show,” he says. “He came to my shul, sat in on my Gemara class, and came for a meal. I remember him as a musical illui — he was just amazing on all the reed instruments, clarinet and bassoon and contrabassoon and flute.”

The only two who remained permanently in music were Nulman and Lamm. David Nulman, who lives in Monsey, has taught music in many schools, including the Manhattan Day School. He has led many bands and choirs, and composes music. The Captain David and the Little Rebbes of Rhythm CDs are his creation.

Yisroel Lamm earned a master’s in mechanical engineering, but ultimately had to make a choice between pursuing a PhD or continuing in music. He chose to follow his bliss, and ever since has been ubiquitous on the Jewish music scene as a conductor and arranger. Engineering’s loss is Jewish music’s gain.

Today, they all marvel at how Jewish music has changed, how much it has become a business instead of the innocent hobby they knew. “The business became less friendly and collegial after our days,” Rabbi Greebel says. “The big orchestras began demanding exclusivity.”

Most of the players, now grandparents and even great-grandparents, can’t help but wince as they relate to the way Jewish music has become so loud and electronic. “All that volume takes away from the musicality,” Nulman complains, and Greebel says that in those days the amp for an accordion was no bigger than a briefcase. “We knew how to play quiet dinner music during the meals,” he says.

But go fight City Hall; as Yisroel Lamm reminds us, each generation has its tastes and standards and deplores the tastes of the succeeding one. But thanks to the Pirchei band’s early efforts, Jewish music has become so diverse, sophisticated, and accessible today that there’s really something for everyone. That’s a pretty big change from the days when you had to hire a non-Jewish band when you wanted to dance at a wedding… or a bunch of yeshivah boys who couldn’t even read music.

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha Issue 655)