Echoes of song, fragments of emotion, wisps of memory. It’s a melody that still replays in your mind, years after its chorus first captured your heart.

What’s that tune that, when you hear it, brings you back to another place, time, and association? Or perhaps it’s an old, long-forgotten Jewish song, maybe one that never conquered the limelight but conquered your neshamah?

We asked readers and public figures to share some of those memories intertwined with old and forgotten songs — because when it comes to a niggun, past and present merge into a timeless inspiration

Moshe Brog, Lakewood, NJ

Songs of My Heart: “My Dear Nicholai”; “Yakob”

Albums: JEP Volume II; Reb Yom Tov Ehrlich / Yiddish Gems Volume I

There are two deeply stirring songs that I’d like to hear played again today. Both seem emblematic of the longings and struggles that a Jew experiences. And both are displays of lyrical genius.

One is “How are you, my dear Nicholai” from JEP, the letter to a Russian child from a Brooklyn child who empathizes with the Russian child’s deep emotional pain and yearning for true connection to Hashem, and shares his own emotional high of a Torah-infused day. The sweet voice, the feel of a personal letter read aloud, make the song transcend the bounds and limitations of cool intellect into the heartfelt realm of deep feelings and yearnings of connection.

The other is Reb Yom Tov Ehrlich’s “Yakob” — a ballad that transports you to the depths of a bochur’s loneliness on the isolated fields at night to the emotional tsunami a local marriage proposal created within him. It lets you feel the battle of the forces of sweet temptation versus emes, and reaches a crescendo in the eventual triumph of what is right and what is good, ending with his dramatic escape.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 710)