Sheya Mendlowitz auditioned for and was accepted into the Pirchei choir he so enjoyed. He would arrive at the studio wide-eyed with curiosity, taking it all in; he noted the voices, songs, and arrangements. There was one solo (on the first Camp Sdei Chemed album) that captured him, the vocalist not much older than he — a young Lubavitch boy from Crown Heights.

“V’nikeisi domom lo nikeisi,” Sheya sings, and stops. “It was the way he said the word domom”—he imitates the warble—“there was something so deep in that.”

It was a time when people still remembered how the earth was soaked with Jewish blood. Avremel Friedman, a child of survivors, touched hearts with the implications of Hashem’s promise.

Close to two decades later, when Sheya Mendlowitz was producing Avraham Fried’s albums, he insisted that that song, “V’nikeisi,” be included on the Goodbye Golus album — with a nod to the past. The song opens with a recording of that day, little Avremel in studio, and continues with the adult version of Fried for the crescendo. It’s a touch of nostalgia, but also a good example of the “vision” that people ascribe to Sheya.

I’m not used to hearing Avraham Fried’s voice exuding anything but buoyancy and power, but when I ask him about Sheya, I hear traces of that once-shy young man. “Sheya made me. He was the shaliach to help me into this industry, involved in every facet of production. Most of all, he was a good friend.”

Avraham Fried, prince of the chassidic music world — pauses. “I owe him a lot.”

Like many of the blessings of Sheya’s life, the shidduch came through Reb Eli Teitelbaum. Still a bochur, Avremel had no ambitions of being a singer, but he was considering performing adult solos on various tapes. He created a demo and sent it out. Reb Eli suggested that Sheya listen. He remembers the moment.

“I heard his voice. He was singing a song later released with the words ‘You’re Never Alone,’ and it all came back to me, how taken I’d been with him as a child. We immediately made an agreement for him to do a solo on a wedding album I was doing, to the song ‘Aruka Mei’eretz Middah.’”

Sheya wasn’t the only one who saw potential. It was 1980, and he was working arranging wedding orchestras out of an office on Avenue J under the name Zimriah. The star of the Jewish music scene, Mordechai Ben David, was a friend he’d made in this new world of music production.

“Mordche had just come out with a release, ‘Moshiach Is Coming Soon,’ and we met in Reb Eli’s basement, where he gave me a copy. I made him listen to a recording of Fried and he said, ‘Wow, this guy is going places.’”

Sheya Mendlowitz, who would later become the voice that said “go for it” to aspiring young singers, producers, and musicians, went for it.

“Look, there weren’t really many producers back then to model myself after. There was Moshe Kahan z”l who produced Mordche’s Hineni album, but I knew that there was an audience out there. I guess you could say we wrote the book as we went along.”

At the time, the leading distributor of Jewish music was Menorah Records. “I walked into Sol Tishler’s office – I was all of 19 years old — and I said, ‘Okay, I have a singer, I’ll do the work, I need funding.’

“Tischler asked me how much I needed. I had no clue, so I picked a random number: $25,000. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you $10,000. How should I make out the check?’

“Forget about a business name,” Sheya laughs. “I had no bank account! I took the check and celebrated by going out to eat at Sam’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side. Just me and the Ribbono shel Olam.”

That’s His Hit 

Inexperienced as he may have been, the newly minted producer knew what he wanted. “We chose songs. The idea of recording the ‘Ani Ma’amin’ sung in the concentration camps appealed to us. I had loved ‘Yedid Nefesh’ from the old Chaim Berlin record, and Avremel adapted it to the words of Selichos, kanei l’Shimcha.”

One might forget how young and untested Sheya was at the time. But in case I don’t remember, what he says next reminds me. “Then, one Erev Shabbos I was cleaning my bedroom”—he was a teenager, living at home—“and the radio was on, Art Raymond on WEVD. He played a song from Kol Salonika’s Shabbos album, composed by Rabbi Baruch Chait, and I said, ‘Okay, this will be Avremel’s first hit.’ ”

It was a simpler time. Mendlowitz headed over to Focus Electronics and bought the tape featuring the song “Keil Hahoda’os.” It would define the young Avraham Fried.

On a lesser scale, it would define Sheya as well — this ability to take songs, repackage them and give them new life. “Keil Hahoda’os” had been popular before, but it grew wings in its reincarnation. (This would happen again and again throughout Sheya’s career. Chaim Banet released “Machnisei Rachamim” on a Seret-Vizhnitz album. It was mildly successful, but Sheya had Shlomo Simcha rerelease it and it came alive. He asked Shlomo Carlebach’s permission for Shlomo Simcha to sing “Moshe V’Aharon” in concert with slight modifications, and it was reborn.)

“Yossi Green has a crazy ability to create songs perfectly suited to the performer, and he wrote us a title track, ‘No Jew Will Be Left Behind.’ Mordche advised me to record in Israel, where studio time and musicians were much cheaper. We worked on the rhythm first, the piano, drums, and guitar. Then we added the brass and then the strings, which was a new way of doing things. Only then did Avremel actually sing.”

The new album came out for Lag B’omer of 1981.

And it didn’t go.

But the young producer, undaunted, had an idea. He approached all his friends going to summer camp and offered them free copies. “Here,” he told them, “just make sure to teach the songs in camp.”

At summer’s end, sales of “No Jew Will Be Left Behind” skyrocketed.

“We sold about 25,000 copies,” Sheya remembers. (In today’s digital market, 3,000 albums is okay; 5,000–10,000 is impressive.)

Sheya’s new role — talent scout, song selector, budgeting director, salesperson — thrusted him toward the wider stage.

Sheya points upwards. “He let me do it, He’s always allowed me to chase my dreams and He’s fulfilled them. That was the start of something special.”

Speak to Sheya

Here’s a riddle I made up while working on this article.

Q: Which three words launched more musical careers in the frum world than any other?

A: Speak to Sheya.

Sheya, recalls Mordechai Ben David, started off as an astute fan and never lost the fan’s discernment. “He was in the audience, but you could see he understood music. That vantage point — that view of the listeners — was the gift he brought to the job. Later, he produced for me, creating the concept of MBD and Friends and really outdoing himself with the double album, which was groundbreaking for Jewish music.

“He saw things differently from anyone else and even now, I speak to him at least once a day. I need his opinion and I trust his opinion.”

Creating great music and honing new singers might have looked like fun, but there was tension and pressure as well. “You know, the producer’s got to deal with every detail, from paying the technicians to buying pizza,” Sheya says. “It’s all part of the job.”

Food, he chuckles, wasn’t a problem with Avraham Fried. “We could have a six-hour session and he barely ate half a tuna sandwich. Dedi Graucher, who you know is a big guy, was more exciting. When he was recording, it was Yom Tov in the studio. He would come with food for an army.”

He remembers endless recording sessions, songs done again and again until they were perfect (Avremel’s “Meshoch Chasdecha” from the Forever One album “took forever,” says Sheya — packing so many different styles and vocal arrangements into one song was a novelty at the time) while some were left on the studio floor. He recalls recording MBD and Friends two days before Shavuos, and the engineer working slowly and thoroughly, day spilling into evening, evening into night. Finally, the plodding engineer felt that the track was ready. “Mordche said, ‘How much do we owe you?’ He paid the guy, and as soon as the engineer left, he took a scissor to the tape. He was certain that there would be no brachah from being up late at night Erev Shavuos.”

Recording the megahit “Daagah Minayin” on the double album was exhausting. “The harmonic opening was conceived almost on the spot, Mordche doing it again and again. It was thrilling, but not as easy as it sounds when you hear it,” Sheya admits.

In addition to pizza, Sheya brought something else to the studio, just as valuable as good judgment and a sharp ear. Every industry has its egos, and the music world is no different. “Sheya is a farginner,” conductor and Neginah Orchestra founder Yisroel Lamm tells me. “It’s not so easy to find that in any field, but Sheya likes to let people shine. That’s what he does best.”

You’re Gonna Do It

A string of successful albums (albums by Fried, MBD, Dance with the Piamentas, Holyland’s Greatest Hits) and sellout events opened the door for the next frontier in Jewish music.

Mordechai Ben David clearly enjoys the memory of how, when visiting his daughter in Camp Fay-Gah in 1986, he was asked by the camp director, Rabbi Stern, to head across the street and visit the special-needs children in Camp HASC. He graciously agreed, but was uncertain of what to sing, how to approach the crowd.

“I started to sing,” MBD tells me. “I even remember which song — ‘V’koreiv Pizurenu’ — and the room lit up. These kids who’d been looking listless suddenly came to life, dancing and singing along. I knew then that I wanted to do this again.”

The next year, Mordche brought his friend Sheya along for a concert. Sheya was blown away and asked if he might come with his family for Shabbos. After that exhilarating Shabbos, Sheya thanked his host, HASC director Moishe Kahn.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it, because I’m not sure we’ll be here next year,” Kahn said, explaining that financial challenges put the camp’s future in jeopardy.

“Wait! We’ll make a concert and raise money,” Sheya told the stunned director.

The concept of mixing music and philanthropy wasn’t new, but it was a novelty for the heimish world.

“Ding [David Golding, of Suki and Ding Productions] gets the credit for shooting high,” Sheya recalls. “I was thinking Felt Forum and $25 a ticket, but Ding suggested that we do it at a classier venue, Avery Fisher Hall, in Manhattan. That,” he says, “is when Jewish music really started to happen.”

That first HASC concert in 1988 featured Mordechai Ben David, Avraham Fried, and Yoel Sharabi; tickets went for hundreds of dollars. The more generous donors were invited to a postconcert reception and the biggest givers were picked up from their homes in limousines. Men and women arrived in formal evening attire.

“I heard from one of the owners of an upscale Boro Park clothing store that women would come in before the concert, looking for something elegant to wear,” Sheya confides.

In the world of frum entertainment, you can sometimes get a sense that everyone with graying hair is called a “legend.” But two authentic legends shared almost identical stories with me. Both Yisroel Lamm and Abie Rotenberg were near misses. If Sheya had been a bit less persistent, the communal music library would be a little poorer.

Following the success of the first HASC concert, Sheya called Abie, asking him to write an English song to be used in HASC 2 the following year. He sent a moving video of the extraordinary work being done for the severely challenged kids and a deeply affected Abie wrote the words and music for “Who Am I.” He presented it to Sheya a few weeks before the concert, and told him to find the right singer to perform it.

But Sheya wasn’t looking for a singer; he already had someone in mind. “You’re going to sing it,” he told Abie.

“Me? I’m a composer, not a performer. I don’t get up onstage in front of such big crowds!”

Sheya had stopped listening. “He basically dragged me kicking and screaming to Avery Fisher Hall,” Abie admits.

Sheya had another dream for HASC 2 — to bring a full-scale symphony orchestra to an Orthodox stage. He and legendary arranger Yisroel Lamm collaborated on the project: Lamm arranged and composed the music, and the two traveled to Eretz Yisrael to select the musicians. “Now we need a conductor,” Yisroel Lamm remembers thinking. But Sheya had no intention of looking for a conductor.

“You’ll conduct,” he told Yisroel.

“I was a bit frightened. I’d never conducted an orchestra that size, but he kept insisting. So I took a crash course in conducting and, with

siyata d’Shmaya and Sheya’s encouragement, I got through the evening. I’ve been doing it ever since.”

One imagines a younger Sheya Mendlowitz in the darkened hallways offstage at HASC 2, watching Abie sing, Yisroel conduct — too busy to allow himself a small smile of satisfaction. Thanks, Sheya.

Along with HASC’s high moments, there were challenging ones as well.

“The concert after 9/11 was tough going — everyone discouraged us from trying. It was hard to get a venue, and no one felt like coming out for music. Except that they did. We created a program filled with patriotism (singing the national anthem and ‘G-d Bless America,’ in the presence of New York City’s mayor), acknowledging what people were feeling. It was the perfect balance.”

Sheya doesn’t apologize for decisions that proved less clairvoyant. “It’s true that we gave Mattisyahu entry to the frum world. He may have disappointed some people with choices he’s made since then, but I don’t think anyone should judge him. He didn’t know much about Yiddishkeit, and he is a sincere person. You know what? He’ll be back.”

Sheya resisted certain ideas and was proven wrong; he fought for other innovations and was vindicated.

“From the first time I heard the song ‘V’sein Bonu,’ I didn’t like it. It became a hit, but I’m still not crazy over it. I thought ‘Tanya’ was a mistake and discouraged Avremel, but Yossi Green pushed him. So I guess I was wrong there too.”

But he’s been right far more often. He conceived of a men’s choral ensemble — called 101 Talented Voices — and selected the song, “Ribbono shel Olam,” which he felt suited Mordechai Ben David’s voice. “He didn’t hear the value of the song at first, but we pushed him to it.”

(“He didn’t push me to the Ribbono shel Olam,” MBD quips. “He pushed me to the song with the words Ribbono shel Olam.”)

A Way Past It

Eventually, HASC and Sheya parted ways.

“It’s a tough industry,” a close associate of Sheya’s tells me, “especially if you’re the visionary. Sheya has the ideas, sets the tone, but he thinks big, does things on a large scale, and there are always well-meaning people in a back office trying to cut costs.”

The large-scale events, the outstanding sound and well-crafted programs became the new normal, with the entire industry taking its cue from Sheya.

Until today, the ideas keep coming from his direction — and ideas have never been more necessary. But ironically, even as the fan base for Jewish music keeps growing, business opportunities have shrunk.

“Concerts? There’s no more need for concerts,” an industry insider says wryly. “Why should someone pay for a ticket and shlep out if he can watch the whole event live on his computer, or wait until the next day when it’s posted online?

“And wait,” he continues, “who needs concerts when weddings have become concerts? Today, we have concerts with eight-, nine-piece bands and some of the more upscale weddings have twenty pieces. It’s become a trend — and weddings have no budgets, because they’re not for profit.”

(Concerts in Israel, however, are much more profitable. “In Eretz Yisrael, people come early, they participate, they’re into it, but in America the audience acts like they’re doing you a favor by being there. Everyone is looking at their cell phones.”)

We’re joined in conversation by Sheya’s friend and business associate, guitar whiz Yanky Katina. When I broach the topic of the industry’s evolution and its possible obsolescence, Yanky Katina indicates his friend. “This man has been figuring out ways to keep the industry current. He was the first to perceive the value of music videos as a way of creating hype. You know how everyone is doing concerts on cruise ships? Sheya saw that coming five, six years ago. When he opened the   Mostly Music store in Boro Park, there was a karaoke-style studio in the store for private recordings, fairly common now. He sees the challenge and then sees a way past it.”

I hear variations on the same theme from several sources: how a young singer released his first album to an underwhelming response, and to make things more difficult, one of the big-name singers released an album the same week. Then the producer, a competitor/friend, approached Sheya, desperate for advice how to help the young artist.

Sheya had an idea. He suggested that the singer record short clips of each song on a CD and give it out free in stores, so that when customers came in to purchase the other new CD, they would take home the freebie as well. The artist was gifted enough, Sheya predicted, that people would hear his voice and be hooked.

It worked, and sales rocketed, giving Jewish music a new star. Today, virtually every release is launched with a free sampler.

Still Rejoicing

But challenges to this technologically changing, ever-discriminating industry — daunting though they may have been — are nothing compared to the personal challenges Sheya’s faced.

Diabetic for some time, Sheya sustained a massive heart attack last winter.

He was hospitalized, then released. But there was a lingering pain in his leg, which turned out to be an acute infection that spread — and led to another heart attack. “I remember going down, the feeling of fighting with the Malach Hamaves, the paddles on my heart, the compressions. They almost lost me.”

He looks down for a moment then faces me with a brilliant smile. “But I lost my leg. They had to remove it.”

He offers this information as if telling me about an ingrown toenail. Clearly, he’s worked on this.

When friends and family descended on the hospital after hearing about the emergency surgery, Sheya welcomed them with a ready joke, understanding how awkward they must have felt.

“You want to know what it’s like? I can’t tell you al regel achas,” he quipped again and again — giving over a message that Sheya was still Sheya. Those moments might have been his greatest production yet.

“HaKadosh Baruch Hu is good to me. There are people with real problems. I read about Israeli soldiers who come back from the front missing an arm or leg. I’m a soldier too and this is my scar.”

Suddenly, his eyes moisten. “During those first few hours, when everything seemed so bleak, my son came in and I saw how frightened he was. ‘Yitzchok,’ I said, ‘I promise I’ll walk you to the chuppah.’ The promise was bigger than my situation, than the prognosis, than the way things seemed. Yet Hashem allowed me to fulfill that promise two weeks ago. I was zocheh to walk him down.

“Please,” he holds up his hand, “don’t be so impressed. We can walk together to Maimonides and you’ll see how lucky I am, how lucky we all are.

“But I will say this. The sefer Chovos Halevavos, Shaar Habitachon, is a gift. I’m also blessed that I have a very dedicated family and close network of supportive friends, including people like Shlomo Simcha, Abie Rotenberg, Yisroel Lamm, Yossi Green, Rabbi Baruch Chait, Yerachmiel Begun, and Suki Berry, who are mentors and colleagues in the music world.”

And then, obviously done with the topic, he shakes his head and starts to sing. “Nu, Yanky,” he waves his hand in a let’s-move-on gesture and the gifted Yanky Katina starts to play. Sheya chooses the song spontaneously. The words are samei’ach tisamach rei’im ha’ahuvim.

These days, Sheya Mendlowitz might have the luxury of moving into the role of senior statesman for the industry he helped create, but instead he’s keeping busy. Along with Yanky Katina, he runs a popular orchestra. He still produces albums and memorable events, still enjoys helping new artists develop (“You must hear this,” he says with enthusiasm, playing me a clip of a fresh singer named Yoni Z) and is equally content to sit back and watch other shine.

“There’s great music being made, some really good new names,” he says. But personally, he prefers to listen to older stuff, to Mordche and Avremel of the ’80s. “There’s something authentic about it, no cut-and-paste, nothing robotic. Back then, everything was human.”

He lifts himself up, using a cane and the back of a chair; you see the struggle, but also the dignity.

“You know, there’s lots of kvetching about the state of music today, that people have no attention span, that it’s hard to reach them, that they’ve become emotionless. But we do events and simchahs every single night, and it’s simply not true.

“I’ll tell you something. I do affairs where the baalei simchah give me carte blanche. They tell me, ‘Sheya, make it extraordinary.’ Of course, it’s thrilling to create a magnificent chuppah, to put together a 50-piece orchestra that will make the simchah memorable. But for me, arranging a one-man band for a rebbi making his first chasunah is just as special, just as powerful. Music transcends the externals. It’s real.”

He stops, squaring his shoulders and preparing to head out to the busy street. “You just have to find the way. People are real. They deserve real music. That never changed and it never will.”  —

Who wrote the song

While Sheya’s name as producer and talent scout are legend in the industry, he has one more latent talent: composer. He shares how late one Motzaei Shabbos he stood on the porch of his Cedarhurst home when a new niggun somehow emerged from within. It was the middle of the night and before the age of digital recording, so Sheya checked the time difference to see if Shabbos was over in Israel and called his friend, conductor and composer Mona Rosenblum. “I said, ‘Listen, I have new song and it’s a winner. I’m calling back — let your answering machine pick it up.’ ”

Sheya sang his new song into Mona’s machine. Mona happened to be sitting with a composer for one of the large chassidic courts, who immediately perceived the song’s appeal. “I’m taking it for our rebbe’s upcoming chasunah,” he said.

At the festive court wedding, the new “Siman Tov Umazel Tov” carried the night; the next morning guests were humming the tune as they walked to shul. In fact, it was used as the title track on the album released to commemorate the wedding, its composer listed as… well, not as Sheya Mendlowitz.

“I called up the producer and asked why they’d replaced my name, and he said that es hut nisht gepast that such a hit should come from outside the chassidus, so they did a bit of revisionism,” Sheya says. “I didn’t appreciate it. That song was a gift Hashem had given me.”

The day of reckoning, however, arrived. Sheya was in Eretz Yisrael, waiting to be interviewed as a guest on a popular music show. The interviewee before him was the chassidic musician.

“Tell me,” said the host, “who really composed ‘Siman Tov’? Was it you, or perhaps it was Sheya Mendlowitz?”

The guest conceded, somewhat reluctantly, that it was Sheya’s song.

The door opened and Sheya Mendlowitz walked into the studio, smiling broadly.

“Thank you,” he nodded graciously, finally feeling vindicated.

(Originally Featured in XXX, Issue XXX)