For Dedi, nothing compared to the incredible joy he felt when he found innovative ways to make simple people happy 

Photos: Ezra Trabelsi, Family archives

While Dedi Graucher a”h was known as a dynamic singing sensation who won the hearts of fans all over the world, his talents stretched far beyond the musical realm. In addition to loving a good joke and being incredibly funny, Dedi was a man on a mission: He lived to spread simchah, whether it was through music, humor, or acts of tzedakah and chesed, and his passing last month at the age of 62 after  battling an illness for five years left a gaping hole in the hearts of his family and his many admirers all across the globe.

Dedi could make his audience laugh and cry, but most of all, he made them happy. And he had that knack from the time he first stood on the stage as a young kid.

Like so many other young boys with a flair for music, Oded David Graucher, known to the world as Dedi, harbored childhood dreams of becoming a singer. When Yigal Calek, creator of the London School of Jewish Song, launched a boys choir in Eretz Yisrael, Dedi was all in, and that’s how he first crossed paths with Dovid Nachman Golding, better known in the Jewish music business as Ding. Dedi was performing with Pirchei Yerushalayim at a Brooklyn College Chol Hamoed concert, and Golding, two years his senior, was a teen chaperone for the choir.

“He was 14 and probably the oldest,” recalls Ding, who was just starting out in the Jewish music business at the time and was helping out with the choir, “but he was already like an adult, with a great sense of humor. All the kids in the choir looked up to him. It wasn’t that he was the star soloist — he just had that personality.”

Being in the choir was a dream come true for Dedi, paving the way for his entrance into a world that had captured his heart. Dedi loved going to weddings, and if Mona Rosenblum was in charge of the music, he’d give Dedi an opportunity to join the musicians on the bandstand. Holding a microphone in his hand, Dedi would recall Calek’s advice to be creative and to use his talent to the fullest, letting his voice fill the room with happiness. For the young Dedi, the experience was pure bliss.

But joy was a scarce commodity in Dedi’s life the next time his path crossed with Ding’s. Ding was learning in Yerushalayim at Yeshivas Itri together with his close friend and future music partner Suki Berry, and one day he saw a forlorn-looking teenager in a kippah serugah sitting on the stairs outside. Ding was surprised to hear the young bochur calling him by name as he walked by, although he couldn’t manage to put a name to the face.

“Ata lo zocher oti — you don’t remember me?” asked the teen. “Ani Dedi.”

But the 16-year-old who Ding saw that day barely resembled the effervescent kid he remembered from Pirchei Yerushalayim, and Dedi explained that he had recently lost his mother in a tragic accident. Ding invited Dedi to learn with him in yeshivah once a week and as the months went by, Dedi asked Ding and Berry repeatedly to come spend Shabbos at his home in Ramat Gan. As the zeman came to a close, the two took Dedi up on his offer, spending their final Shabbos in Eretz Yisrael at the Graucher home before heading off to spend the summer at Camp Agudah Toronto.

“We had a beautiful Shabbos, and during Shalosh Seudos, Dedi’s father sent him across the street to give a message to a neighbor,” says Ding. “As soon as he left, his father told us that he wanted to thank us privately for helping Dedi. He said that he really believed that Dedi needed to get away from everything and asked us to take him to the States for the summer.”

As soon as Shabbos ended, Ding reached out to the camp and got Dedi a spot as a waiter. Arriving in New York a few days later, Dedi was delighted to spend his last day before camp started accompanying Ding and Berry to the music studio where, young as they were, they had already branded themselves as Suki and Ding and were producing Mordechai Ben David’s V’Chol Maaminim album. When a harmony was needed for the song “Vatiten,” one of the album’s tracks, Dedi stepped up to the mic, recording his first adult vocals while embarking on what was to become a lifelong friendship with MBD.

The following day, Dedi made his way to Toronto where he began his short-lived stint as a camp waiter. Ding remembers walking into the dining room for supper on the very first night of camp, and seeing that every table was set, except for two. Both were Dedi’s tables. Wasting no time, the head counselor cornered Dedi, demanding an explanation. Instead, he was met with a confused stare, as his young Israeli staff member asked him what the problem was.

“You’re supposed to set the table,” said the head counselor, explaining that the campers needed plates, cups, and silverware in order to eat supper.

“What am I, the slave?” asked Dedi incredulously. “Let them get up and get them themselves.”

The head counselor’s on-the-spot decision to replace Dedi on the wait staff and channel his energy in a different direction was prescient. A 17-year-old jack of all trades, Dedi was a superstar when it came to keeping the camp’s ruach at record levels — he became the heartbeat of Camp Agudah that summer. Never mind that Hebrew was his native language — he would happily tell jokes in his broken English, and if his lack of language skills became part of the punchline, that was more than fine with him. As color war neared, Dedi got a crash course on red and blue teams and became the centerpiece of the game plan, agreeing to have word spread that he had been brought to camp because he was socially off as part of the breakout.

When the summer ended, Dedi returned to Eretz Yisrael, where he learned at Yeshivat Kfar Haroeh and worked on recording his first solo album, a project that he had begun at his father’s urging. But soon tragedy struck the Graucher home yet again, with Dedi’s father passing away that same year. Dedi’s rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Neria, was one of several people who pushed the talented bochur to complete the album, lending both emotional and financial support to the grief-stricken teen.

Music became his outlet during that difficult time and it also helped Dedi find his shidduch. His path crossed with Malca Sand from Montreal when they were both 17-year-olds and spending Rosh Hashanah with their families at the Nir Etzion hotel near Haifa. Dedi invited Malca to come for a walk with him, telling her just seven minutes later that they would be married one day.

“I came home and said, ‘Mommy, I met a meshugeneh,’ ” recounts Malca.

Dedi would serenade Malca with her favorite song, MBD’s iconic “I’d Rather Pray and Sing,” and the two married — as Dedi predicted — after they graduated high school. He often credited her for not just supporting him, but also encouraging him in a demanding career that involved many, many long hours spent away from home.