Some family connections for the people who’ve been creating our soundtrack all these years

These are the days that we connect to our past, but we also want to let our past connect to us — the influence of the traditions, messages and legacies of our predecessors on our lives, knowing that we came from someplace meaningful and wanting to pay it forward. What were the songs that played, helping us forge our bonds with those legacies? Some family connections for the people who’ve been creating our soundtrack all these years

Rabbi Baruch Chait

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

Way back when I attended Mesivta of Eastern Parkway, I was in the school choir led by Rabbi Seymour Silbermintz. He taught us a choir piece called Hallelu, which I think actually came from my uncle, the chazzan Rabbi Zecharia Meinz. Over the years, I’ve taught the piece to the boys at Maarava, and still sing it with them every Shabbos at the seudah. It’s an oldie, but they love it nowadays, too. It has a few different parts, which really lend themselves to the achdus of choral singing, and
a part that I sing solo.

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

My father, Rabbi Moshe Chait, a shul rabbi and later the rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Yerushalayim, had a very nice voice and loved music. He even taught me to play the harmonica. He had three brothers, all rabbis, who put together a record called The Yeshiva Melodies of Chofetz Chaim when I was a little kid, and that was a big influence on me. They were talmidim of Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in Williamsburg, and they loved to sing and harmonize together. Their record is a collection of old yeshivah tunes from Europe, songs like “Yevareich es Beis Yisrael” and “Kol rinah viyeshuah be’ahalai tzaddkim… Yemin, yemin, yemin Hashem osah chayil.” I guess you could call them the Rabbis’ Sons’ Fathers!

As a side note, our first Rabbis’ Sons record was supposed to be called Songs of Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva, as it was really a fundraising project for the yeshivah, which our families were deeply connected to. But when the rosh yeshivah, Rav Henoch Leibowitz, heard the 60s guitar-influenced music, he said he would rather the record be called something else, so we changed it and went for something with a bit more of a catchy ring.

WHAT I TOOK FROM MY GRANDPARENTS

My father’s mother would join us for Shabbos, and she loved to sing the old-time “Menuchah Vesimchah” that she’d brought along from her life in Poland. We included that niggun from my childhood Shabbos table on the Kol Salonika Volume Five, Songs of Shabbos album.

INFLUENCES OF MY YOUNGER YEARS

The most powerful influence for me was Shlomo Carlebach. I first met Shlomo when I was about 15, when my father, a shul rabbi, brought him to sing at a program for baalei teshuvah in his shul. I felt such uplift from his niggunim, and we became friends. I didn’t necessarily go for Shlomo’s concerts, but I went for the kumzitz held afterward. We would sing the same song for an hour — it took time until we got into it, and then we didn’t want to get out of it.

MY FATHER’S FAVORITES

My father liked our song “Kavei el Hashem” from the first Rabbis’ Sons album. He also loved my “Mi Ha’ish.” I remember how he’d play it on the harmonica.

SONGS WITH ENDURING IMPACT

My father would sing the Yiddish “A Sukkaleh a Kleineh,” which he learned from his mother. It was part of our Succos when we were growing up. We took an interesting gamble when we decided to put this song on the first Rabbis’ Sons Hallelu album, even though we didn’t know the song’s origins, and our audience wasn’t exactly Yiddish speaking. The words and melody were very all-encompassing, with a beautiful and simple meaning, and it was adaptable to guitar arrangement, so we decided to record it. I think that our release put this old song back on the map. It’s since been rerecorded many times, and covered in English and Hebrew translations, too.

Rabbi Baruch Chait, a veteran artist (Rabbis’ Sons, Kol Salonika), prolific composer of hundreds of well-known songs and author of a number of educational children’s books, is rosh yeshivah of the Israeli high school Maarava.

Shloime Daskal

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

“A Tatteh bist du, gohr a getrier...” written by Avraham Fried back in 1983 on his Forever One album. My father passed away when I was just seven, and as I had no living father, Hashem was my father, and in this song I felt that I was talking to Him. I sort of adopted it as my personal song, and I still sing it today.

SONGS WITH ENDURING IMPACT

Since my mother was widowed and there was no father in our home, our family was invited to the Rebbe’s Seder every year. Vihznitz was smaller then, like a family, and the Rebbe, the Yeshuos Moshe, was a father figure to us, and to all the chassidim. There is one wordless “teniyeh,” one distinctive musical phrase, that the Rebbe sang between each section of the Hagaddah, and that always penetrated me deeply. Any Vizhnitzer chassid who’s ever been at the Rebbe’s Seder knows that piece, and I’ve had conversations with bochurim who are struggling, but if I start that niggun, they become emotional. Of course, I sing it today with my children. It’s a niggun that’s a part of me.

WHAT I TOOK FROM MY GRANDPARENTS

I have no memories, since my grandparents died before I was born — and many of the European-born grandparents of my generation perished in the war. I hope the people today who have zeides and bubbes appreciate what they have.

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

Although my father passed away when I was just a child growing up in Eretz Yisrael, I have some cherished memories. Before Pesach, as he checked every single hand-baked matzah for any folds, the children would sit around him watching, and he would sing “Vehi She’amdah.” [The tune originated in Vizhnitz but is today sung widely by all chassidim.] He had many, many Pesach chumras. We’d go with our own container to milk the cows in Moshav Komemiyus so we had our own Pesach milk, and my father would cook up the sugar in water and filter it before Pesach. Everything was homemade, with extremely limited ingredients. But whatever chumras he kept, my father did them with simchah, not with stress, and we children can still hear him singing the beautiful “Vehi She’amdah.” We could sense the joy in it — and that’s why we continue the mesorah of these chumras in our own homes today.

INFLUENCES OF MY YOUNGER YEARS

I grew up in Kiryat Vizhnitz in Bnei Brak. It was a world apart, with no concerts, no big musicians, no music events. The influence was the Rebbe and the special Vizhnitzer nusach. Vizhnitz was a world with its own music. In Vizhnitz when they chose a baal tefillah, the criterion was not necessarily a nice voice, but rather someone with a genuine, deep, heartfelt feeling for the tefillah. Besides, the nusach was so warm that it woke you up from the inside — you didn’t need a powerful baal tefillah to bring it home.

LINGERING SOUNDS OF SHABBOS

I sing all the zemiros I grew up with — I wouldn’t want to miss any of them. Most of these niggunim were only known in Vizhnitz, although recently more of them have become popularized. For example, the tune that’s become popular for “Sisu V’simchu B’simchas HaTorah” is a wordless Vizhnitz niggun that was sung with great hype and excitement whenever the Rebbe would dance. When I hear it, it reconnects me to my childhood.

Shloime Daskal, born in Bnei Brak, is a popular chassidish wedding and events vocalist based in New York.

Pinky Weber

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

The Satmar “Shulem Aleichem.” It’s a niggun from before the war, extremely heartfelt, which I heard as a little child in growing up in Satmar in Williamsburg and which I still sing today. Also, the beautiful “Naanuim” niggun we sing on Succos.

INFLUENCES OF MY YOUNGER YEARS

I used to listen to a lot of records as a child. Pirchei was my favorite, and there was also Dovid Werdyger, Yom Tov Ehrlich, and Ben Zion Shenker. MBD came later — he was already on cassette tape rather than vinyl record. He has a fresh sound that I liked a lot, but I would never have believed back then that I would one day compose songs for him. My childhood talent was art, not music. I only started to play when an aunt gave me a keyboard at age 15.

I didn’t have too many weddings to go to during my childhood. It was very different than today, with a lot less happening. But at the few cousins’ chasunahs that I did attend, I was glued to watching the band. I just placed myself right next to them, and my mother knew where to find me at the end. There were no official wedding singers, but Leibele Haschel used to play guitar and sing, along with the Freilach Orchestra led by Moshe Schwartzberg. It was interesting that as a child, I’d watch Leibele avidly, but then I didn’t see him again until years later, when I was a badchan at a wedding in Marina Del Ray, and Chazzan Leibele Haschel was called up to sing. I recognized him and went over to schmooze, and then, two days later, I was shocked to hear that he had suddenly passed away.

WHAT I TOOK FROM MY GRANDPARENTS

My father and grandfather weren’t singers, but way back in our family history, there’s a zeide named Yossel Chazan, who was the baal tefillah in the Ari shul in Tzfas.

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

We davened mostly in Satmar, but on Friday nights while I was growing up, we often went to Stolin, right next door on Rodney Street. My father was raised in Yerushalayim, and he liked that style of davening. The famous Yiddish composer and lyricist Yom Tov Ehrlich davened in Stolin as well, and I would watch how he davened with tears in his eyes. He wasn’t usually the baal tefillah, but I do remember that once on Simchas Torah, they asked Reb Yom Tov to sing, and he sang his famous song about the Malach going around to the nations to offer them the Torah, and how only Am Yisrael happily accepted the offer.

SONGS WITH ENDURING IMPACT

Chanukah with the Rebbe zy”a. I was in the choir that sang for the Rebbe on the last Chanukah of his life. We took a bus to Monroe, and then sang Haneiros Hallalu and Maoz Tzur while the Rebbe lit. We had the privilege of being with the Rebbe for about 20 minutes, watching his light-filled visage as he lit his menorah. On Zos Chanukah, every child went into the Rebbe and received a quarter, which I still have until today. (My friend was so excited about it that he ran to put the quarter into a public phone to tell his mother about it — Oy! It’s an old joke between us.)

Pinky Weber has been inspiring audiences for the past three decades, as a wedding singer, badchan, composer, and lyricist.

Yisroel Lamm

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

As far back as I can remember, there existed an old song “Ko omar… zacharti lach chesed neurayich” and that was my favorite song as a little child. Another song I still connect to comes from fifth grade, when my rebbi was Rav Moshe Wolfson. This was many years ago, before he was recognized as a gadol b’Yisrael, but we loved him as our very special rebbi who showed us the beauty of learning. One time, Rav Moshe announced that if we behaved the whole week, we would have a special treat on Friday. The treat turned out to be a Modzhitz song. Although half the class groaned, I was intrigued when Rav Moshe taught us the old Modzhitz “Bnei Beischa.” It was a nice sweet song, but I think the reason it stuck with me is because of the whole aura of how he presented it.

WHAT I TOOK FROM MY GRANDPARENTS

When I was around 15, I found a trumpet in my mother’s father’s closet. That was my first trumpet and it meant the world to me. He had apparently played it when he served in the US army. On the other side, my father’s father, Reb Pesachya Lamm, was a baal tefillah. Reb Pesachya was a personality, who had come to the US in 1919 and brought his family over, eventually becoming the first glatt kosher butcher in America. On Rosh Hashanah, he was baal mussaf, baal korei, and baal tokeia in the Torah Vodaas minyan. He brought with him songs from Hungary, complicated tunes that we used to sing on Yom Tov, although I never heard them from anyone else before or after.

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

My father was a wonderful baal tefillah with a very sweet voice, but since he was third in the lineup where we davened in Agudah in Williamsburg in the 1950s, we often only heard him daven Minchah on Yom Kippur. But in the years when one of the senior baalei tefillah couldn’t daven, he was up for Shacharis or Mussaf. We loved it when that happened. My mother played violin and piano.

INFLUENCES OF MY YOUNGER YEARS

Reb Ben Zion Shenker’s beautiful recordings, with music arranged by Chanan Winternitz. I remember when stereo sets first came out with speakers, and my mother made place in the living room for me to buy a set. Reb Ben Zion’s albums sounded great on that. I also listened to Mozart and Beethoven a lot, even back then. To me, classical music is one of Hashem’s great gifts to us.

SONGS WITH ENDURING IMPACT

In either fifth or sixth grade, Torah Vodaath experimented with teaching some music as a special treat. We were all brought down to the auditorium, where a Mr. Horowitz played on the accordion and taught us the old song “Kareiv Yom” from Seder night. The chords and the instrument made such a powerful impression on me that as I walked out of that assembly, I said to myself, I’m going to do something with music. That was a key moment for me. It also made me realize that music has to touch something emotionally. It can’t be just an intellectual experience. Music says what poetry can’t, because at that level, it can’t be expressed in words.

LINGERING SOUNDS OF SHABBOS

For me, it wasn’t so much the zemiros that were special moments of Shabbos song, but rather the parts of davening in shul, the Lecha Dodis and Keil Adons that were special. The Agudah had a nice davening, and as I got older and began to daven in Pirchei, Rabbi Belsky led us in a deep appreciation of niggunim in davening. We sang the Modzhitz and Melitz tunes, and I always enjoyed those special moments.

Likewise, my Yom Tov highlights revolve around the tefillos. I always looked forward to “Kah Keili,” which we sing before Mussaf.

Yisroel Lamm, veteran arranger and conductor of the Jewish music industry, was longtime director of Neginah Orchestra and is now an arranger for Aaron Teitelbaum Productions.

Rabbi Hillel Paley

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

Rabbi Baruch Chait’s songs have accompanied me for decades. His early compositions on the Rabbis’ Sons albums were quality niggunim that drew me in as a child, and the style later influenced my own songs. Reb Baruch was actually a good family friend, would come to our home to visit, and even composed a song for one of our family simchahs.

MY FATHER’S FAVORITES

My father was a litvishe Yid from a yeshivah family, with no special connection to music. Music and niggunim were just not a topic of interest in our home. When I’d sing, my father would say, ‘You obviously don’t get that from me.’ He sang the standard zemiros, and since we lived in Ashdod for a time, during the years when the chareidi community was very small, my father became close to the Pittsburgher Rebbe who lived there, and he brought home some of the niggunim from the tish and Shalosh Seudos, so we ended up singing the Pittsburgh “Menuchah Vesimchah” and “Mizmor L’Dovid” at our table. Later, when we moved to Yerushalayim, he brought home a niggun from Toldos Aharon.

LINGERING SOUNDS OF SHABBOS

I sing what we sang at home, but I’ve also added, since my father-in-law, Rav Yisrael Hazeh, was very musical and composed his own zemiros tunes.

Rabbi Hillel Paley, a maggid shiur in Yeshivas Toras Refael in Beit Shemesh, has dozens of classic compositions to his credit, including “Shiru Lamelech,” “Ochilah Lo’Keil,” and “Mesikus HaTorah,” “Torah Hakedoshah,” and many other favorites.

Isaac Honig

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

My father wasn’t really a singer, but I saw that whenever he sang, if it was Shalom Aleichem or zemiros, it was with deep emotion, and that has affected my style of singing.

My grandparents, who were killed in the war, were Zidichover chassidim. But as my father learned in prewar Munkacz, he considered himself a Munkacz, and brought the Munkaczer nusach along with him to America. There were also a few old folk songs he used to sing, “Sol a Kokosh Mar” and “Shirnok Rinok” in Hungarian, and some Yiddish ones. All those songs were about the longing for Mashiach, and when he finished, he would sigh, “Oy, ven kimt shoin Mashiach, ven kimt er shoin?”

There is a certain nusach that my father used to recite the Hagaddah, which was very warm and emotional. I think it probably comes from Zidichov. We all sang along, and it carried us through the whole Yom Tov. The day after Pesach, I didn’t want to go back to cheder because I wanted to stay right there in the special warm space created by that uplifting, emotional nusach from the Seder.

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

When I was about five, my father taught me the song “Husheiv” [part of “V’sei’areiv”] and he would ask me to sing it. I’m happy that I finally recorded it on my recent album, alongside Chazan Leibele Waldman’s “Emes,” which I also learned when I was a child. Both songs still speak to me.

MY FATHER’S FAVORITES

The old “A Sukkaleh,” with its heartfelt chorus, “Oy harachamon, Hu yakim lanu, es sukkas Dovid hanofales.” Oh, he loved it when we sang that song. We used to listen to it on Eli Lipsker’s 1987 album, although it was recorded on various albums before that and has been around for at least a century or more.

INFLUENCES OF MY YOUNGER YEARS

Way back, in the years when Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl was still alive and at the helm of the Nitra yeshivah in Mount Kisco, the yeshivah put on a play, a “Yosef Shpiel.” This was before I was born, in about 1955, and recordings were not so clear, but we had that tape and I used to listen to it again and again. I loved listening to the child who played Yosef, singing his part with incredible depth and pathos. We also had Yigal Calek’s records, I loved his “Chamol,” and on the Sdei Chemed album, I loved “Kol Bayaar,” an old song composed by the Shpoleh Zeide. I listened to that again and again, and recently merited to record it again on my album Kol Bayaar.

LINGERING SOUNDS OF SHABBOS

I still sing the Munkacz “Shulem Aleichem” and “Kol Mekadeish.” And my father’s Eishes Chayil, which I’ve never heard elsewhere (I think he may have started with the Munkacz one, but he digressed from it completely). I won’t change those, because singing them creates a certain atmosphere for me.

Isaac Honig, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, has been a prominent figure in the Jewish music scene for over two decades. He has released five successful albums, his songs and ballads characterized by heartfelt melodies and meaningful lyrics.

Baruch Levine

MY EARLIEST INSPIRATION

As a little kid in the kindergarten, I was in the same class as Shlomo Carlebach’s daughter (he lived in Toronto at that time.) I remember that once or twice, Shlomo came in and sat down with his guitar, and all the children sat around him in a circle, and we sang. My father would put me to bed every night, and play me “Besheim Hashem” from a Shlomo Carlebach tape. When I grew a little older, I was still listening to Carlebach, while most of my friends were following MBD, Avraham Fried, and Miami Boys Choir.

When my parents realized I had musical talent, they bought me a keyboard. I must have been about nine when my father heard me playing something and asked what song it was. I said “I don’t know,” and he answered, “Then it looks like you just composed a song.” I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but I knew it was encouraging.

WHAT I’VE BEEN SINGING SINCE I WAS A KID

I loved Pirchei when I grew up, and I remember that the first time I heard the London School of Jewish Song on a HASC concert recording, I was mesmerized by it. It was an honor to be able to record an entire album of Pirchei classics recently on Off the Record III.

INFLUENCES OF MY YOUNGER YEARS

I grew up in the Agudas Yisroel shul in Toronto, and I would say that was the strongest influence of my childhood. Shul was really central in those days, and Yom Tov in shul was the highlight of the year. When I was young, the shul still had older Yidden, Holocaust survivors, at the amud. They would sing the old prewar niggunim. It goes almost without saying that no young bochurim could lead the davening — a baal tefillah had to be married. We always had beautiful davening and singing in shul. I particularly enjoyed and absorbed the Hallel that our legendary baal tefillah Shloime Goldreich davened every Simchas Torah, and still does. You knew that you were coming to a long davening, but a really special one.

Later on, Camp Agudah Toronto also gave me a lot of singing and musical experience. My first time singing in public was at camp cantatas.

When Abie Rotenberg produced his children’s album “The Golden Crown,” I had acting and singing parts. We’d go to Abie’s house after school, sit around the table and act out the script, then went home to practice. We needed a lot of rehearsals since the studio was rented for one day only. There were times that the actors were laughing so hard that they couldn’t get the lines out. Then one Sunday, we all went downtown to the studio together and recorded all the dialogue in one sitting. Today, recording is a solitary experience, and even duets are often recorded separately. But the fun of that experience left a lasting, sweet impression.

LINGERING SOUNDS OF SHABBOS

We spent a lot of seudos with my uncle Reb Aharon Levine a”h, and I can’t forget the way he sang the Bobover Kah Ribbon.

MY FATHER’S FAVORITES

Back in the day, when I was young, my father loved Carlebach’s “Ana Hashem.” Today, I hope that’s been replaced by one of my songs, but I’m scared to ask….

Baruch Levine was raised in Toronto, where he composed his first published song at age 13. He’s composed many beloved classics and released a dozen albums since. He currently resides with his family in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he’s a rebbi at the Yeshiva K’tana of Waterbury.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)