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

Nechama Friedman, Jerusalem 

Song of My Heart: “Oifn Pripitchik”

Composed by: M.M. Varshavsky in the late 1800s

I cannot think of a more appropriate song for Shavuos than “Oifn Pripitchik.” Although the song is yet to be forgotten, it’s rarely sung in its entirety.

I always knew the tune, some words, echoes of this haunting masterpiece. Then, one Shabbos, a guest from Moscow sang us some beautiful classics in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. It was incredible to hear a young man sing authentic Russian Yiddish. The elders in his childhood community were able to teach him Yiddish but not much more.

And now here he was, raising a frum family together with a lovely wife who had similarly returned to roots that seemed so impossibly severed.

When he sang “Oifn Pripitchik,” we were all in tears. In a rich, melodic voice, he sang of the warm hearth, the rebbi learning with the kids, promising them flags if they learn their nekudos well.

And then he sang “Ir vet, kinder, elter vern, vet ir alein farshtein, vifel in di oysyes lign trern, un vi fil geveyn.” (“When you grow older, children, you will understand by yourselves, how many tears lie in these letters, and how much lament.”)

It’s hard to estimate how, many generations back, a melamed taught some ancestor of our guest that these holy letters encompass the history of our People, but many frigid decades later, the fire in the hearth was rekindled.

Yaakov Shwekey, in his nostalgia album Those Were the Days, sings part of “Oifn Pripitchik” but doesn’t get to the part of the flags or about the tears in the letters. I would love if someone did a real reboot of old Yiddish songs, sung in the authentic dialects in which they were composed.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 710)