“I got a call from a mother who told me how her boys hated school and never learned until they saw the show. They could identify — good old Yossele was just like them”

“I just wanted to create and play music.” That’s how he wound up playing backup for a rock group started by his childhood friend Yosef Karduner back when neither of them dreamed they’d both be chozer b’teshuvah and affiliated with Breslover chassidus. “We had this band called Lahakat 66 — people thought there must be some deep significance to that but we just took the name from the bus line between Ramat Gan and Petach Tikvah.”

Karduner went on to become a major force in the genre of chassidic soul music (think “Shir LaMaalot”) and he credits Azoulai with starting him on the path. It was about 25 years ago and Azoulai had dropped out of sight for a while during the time he was embarking on his own transformation — he had become close to Breslov mashpia Rabbi Erez Moshe Doron. One day he met up with Karduner in a Tel Aviv recording studio but now he had a large yarmulke beard and peyos. Most people don’t get introduced to Yiddishkeit with a heavy mussar sefer like Mesillas Yesharim but Azoulai didn’t waste any time with his old friend: he handed him a copy of the sefer and told him he would call Yosef in three days to see if he’d read it. Within a week Karduner was putting on tefillin and learning privately with Rabbi Doron. “Yosef with you it was easy ” Azoulai told him later. “You were already religious. Your soul just needed a reminder.”

Azoulai’s own journey began the year before while he was doing the soundtracks for another talented friend Shachar Blumenthal who had created a popular puppet theater for secular elementary school children. Blumenthal took a year off to travel to the Far East on a self-discovery mission and handed the theater to Azoulai while he was gone. Azoulai was a musician not a puppeteer but he discovered he had a knack for those strings too. And during that year he embarked on his own journey of self-discovery when his fiancé made a religious turnaround through Arachim (they’re still married). That pushed Azoulai to rethink his own life and he wound up under the wing of Rabbi Erez Moshe Doron. He also decided to tweak the show for the religious public.

“When Shachar came back and found that his trusted friend turned religious on him he wasn’t too happy that I’d taken his show to the datiim ” Azoulai remembers “so we decided to split. I would work in the religious sector and he’d stay in the secular world.” He says he chose the name “Ohel Hashem” because obviously this was religious children’s theater infused with moral lessons but it was also a takeoff on his parents’ business. They owned a cafe in a Tel Aviv theater called “Ohel Shem.”

But it wasn’t long before Shachar Blumenthal too became a Breslover and reworked his own show — now called the Lilliput Puppet Theater — to fit his newfound religious audiences. And so for the last two decades the friends have been brainstorming together on characters scripts and soundtracks. “We’ve basically divided up the country into different regions so we work together without competition ” Azoulai says. “And we still speak every day.” (excerpted)