“Something had opened inside of me, a new channel of feeling, and it found expression in music. Whatever opened that day has never really closed.” He closes his eyes. “Baruch Hashem.”

Photo Eli Cobin, Family Archives

He’d rather forget the first record he produced as a teenager in a Petach Tikvah yeshivah, but although that album is long hidden away, it was the inspiration that sent Moshe Mordechai (Mona) Rosenblum on his journey. From director of the IDF Rabbinate Choir to the first Belz albums and early MBD, Mona’s decades-long career as the most celebrated arranger and conductor in Jewish music brings everyone into the niggun

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ntil I met Mona Rosenblum, I was sure he’d match the cool first name. But the gentleman who comes out of the Bnei Brak apartment building to greet me doesn’t look like I imagined a “Mona” to be — artsy and casual. Instead, he looks like a rebbi or vigilant kashrus mashgiach, his hat jammed securely on his head, peyos wrapped tight around his ears, avreich-style dark suit jacket flapping in the breeze.

He leads us into the apartment in the way of someone unaccustomed to this sort of thing. He generously pulls out the chairs and places a closed bottle of water on the table, but forgets about the cups. A few minutes later, he realizes and sheepishly hurries back to the kitchen.

There is kind of a silent laugh in his eyes and he chuckles audibly and often, seemingly amused by his own story. He’s generous with stories and commentary, but it’s when this celebrated conductor, arranger, and composer of modern chassidic music is seated on the dark bench near the large piano that he’s most natural, words flowing as easily as the fingers that dance across the keyboard. Music, in his retelling, isn’t an escape, or even a passion. It’s an identity: The moment he learned about self-expression, the music started playing and it’s never stopped.

Niggun of Tears

The Rosenblums, Reb Ephraim and Bluma, arrived in postwar Eretz Yisrael broken, like so many others. They had two sons, Yitzchak and Moshe Mordechai, but the house was largely defined by its quiet.

“My father,” says Mona, “wasn’t a big talker. He was very much a Gerrer chassid in the way he kept things inside.”

It was a song, a niggun, which was the lone vehicle of expression. Mona begins to sing it, a well-known chassidic slow tune, with no words. “It’s a Vorka niggun. My mother never cried, not a single tear — but whenever my father sang this niggun, she would weep uncontrollably.”

One morning, Bluma was carrying little Moshe Mordechai through the streets of Ramat Gan, and suddenly, inexplicably, she began to talk. And talk.

“She told me about another three-year-old — the same age as I was — her daughter, a sister about whom I’d never known. My mother had been in the process of handing her child off to a sympathetic non-Jewish neighbor when a waiting Nazi lifted his gun and shot the baby, killing her.

“I know,” Mona pauses, “I know that today, people would question my mother for sharing that with a child, but that’s what happened. And I remember it as if it were today. I heard what she was saying, I got it. I felt like I couldn’t cry, that if she was being so stoic, I had to be tough for her sake. I fought it off for a few minutes, choking back the tears, and then, suddenly, it came out in a gush, tears and pain and powerful emotion.”

That day, three-year-old Mona effectively started making music, even if he didn’t know it yet. “Something had opened inside of me, a new channel of feeling, and it found expression in music. Whatever opened that day has never really closed.”

He closes his eyes. “Baruch Hashem.”

And his mother, who inspired it, saw her son rise to the top of his profession. “Until she passed away a few years ago, she would join us for the Shabbos seudos — and she was always in a good mood, never emotional or heavy. But my children knew that during Shalosh Seudos each week, when I would sing that song, the Vorka niggun, the tears would come. That’s when she cried, then — and only then.”

It’s Not About Lessons

The Rosenblums had brought over mini accordions from Europe. “I would play and play. My father would look at me say, ‘Vuss gratchet er? — What’s he wasting his time with?’ but my mother sent me for music lessons. My father also enjoyed music, he davened for the amud in the Gerrer shtibel on Yamim Tovim, but he was a very practical person and didn’t see much value in using time that way.”

These days, parents will often stop Mona Rosenblum and ask about their children’s musical prospects. “They come over and say, ‘My son sometimes plays guitar, I think my daughter has potential on the piano, should we be sending them for formal lessons?’ and I think to myself, ‘You know the answer. The child who needs music needs music — it’s not about lessons. If it’s in them, they’ll gravitate to it like to the food they need to exist.’”

Chazzan Yitzchak Freund of Shaaray Tefila in Lawrence, New York, was a student in the Horev Talmud Torah in Ramat Gan with Mona, and remembers that tiny little accordion. “He carried it around and made music, and it was clear that the music was coming from within him. We sang together as teenagers in the Nachelei Ron choir and as adults in the IDF choir. And I can tell you that he feels music like no one else.”

After his bar mitzvah, Mona was sent to learn in Yeshivas Nachalas Reuven in Petach Tikvah.

“I wasn’t busy with music then, but after a few years in Petach Tikvah, people knew I was musical. I had a friend named Chaim Brozak, and he was sort of a Pirchei leader, working with teenagers at the local Agudah center. One day he says, ‘Listen, I want to make an album with the boys. Can you produce it?’ It made no sense, I had no experience, but I jumped at the chance.”

At the time, Rosenblum points out, there were few albums in the religious world. “A new record came out, that’s all you heard for the next five years. It was a huge undertaking.”

Mona, teenager on a musical mission, took a bus to Tel Aviv.

“In those years, there was this place, Cafe Noga, which was the unofficial ‘exchange’ for the music industry. The musicians sat around each afternoon and customers would come in — this one was getting married, that one was making a concert. There were some instruments at the cafe, and informal little groups would form and take the next job. It was all very charming.

“I remember thinking that all the musicians seemed old, their equipment outdated. I sat around, tried to find the right people and ideas and slowly, it came together.”

Eventually, that album — the maiden offering for Moshe Mordechai Rosenblum — was released: Na’ar Ha’Agudati shel Petach Tikvah. “No one has it,” Rosenblum says, “the album is hidden away.”

And again, he raises his face and spreads his hands apart. “Baruch Hashem it’s hidden.”

Today a father to several musically gifted children, Rosenblum concedes that talent and instincts are imperative, but not enough. “You need to learn music too. Today’s teenagers are much more capable than I was, because they’re growing up in a culture of music, they know more than I did, and they’re exposed to much better sound. I knew nothing.”

Yet even if the album itself remains hidden, it was the inspiration that sent Mona Rosenblum on his journey.

Warm-Up Act

From yeshivah, Mona continued on to the army — to the military choir, a division of the Chief Rabbinate. “We had military responsibilities too, of course, but since the choir is a formal part of the rabbinate, it was a religious framework.”

Concerts by the IDF choir were held at military outposts across the country. “The audience was about the same size as the choir,” Mona jokes. “A few guys singing in a military base dining room, with just an accordion and guitar. More than once they gave us a dark room with no light bulb and no electricity.”

But there was the electricity of connection. “Those concerts taught me about what really works, how to engage an audience in an emotional way.”

The big hit at the time was an Israeli song with the words, “Ani zocher neirot shel Ima.”

“They would always cry. These big, tough men with hardened expressions would suddenly melt. They were all away from home, sometimes for many months, and everyone had an Ima somewhere.”

There was the occasional big gig as well.

“One night, we appeared together with an American guest, Chazzan David Werdyger, at the Beit Knesset Hagadol in Tel Aviv. There was no real rehearsal. Twenty minutes before the show, we went into a side room and he belted out the words ‘David melech Yisrael,’ and we replied, ‘chai!’ — that was pretty much our job. So we changed out of our uniforms and got ready.”

Before the chazzan came onto the stage, the master of ceremonies announced a warm-up act. “Reb Duvid told us that he had a son who could sing, who would be starting off.”

Mona Rosenblum and Mordechai ben David first met that night in Tel Aviv: It’s a friendship that has spanned decades. Both children of survivors, raised on the Gerrer shtibel music of Yankel Talmud, blessed with exceptional talent; all these years later, they still work together.

I ask Mona what song Mordechai ben David sang that night and he frowns, struggling to recall. “I think it was ‘Eliyahu Hanavi.’”

Looking for a New Sound

Mona knew what he wanted to do after he completed his service. “My father was still skeptical, but my mother encouraged me to enroll at Tel Aviv University, where I formally studied music.”