Five decades of children’s choirs, five decades of composition, and Chaim Banet is still in the studio

Photos Ariel Ohana, Family archives

Five decades of children’s choirs, five decades of composition, and Chaim Banet is still in the studio. But his time, he’s joined by the “boys” he started out with — now grown men and grandfathers themselves, rabbanim, businessmen and askanim who’ve come to reminisce about those afternoons in a Haifa basement in Kiryat Vizhnitz where little voices were transformed into the soundtracks of our childhood

The songs are universal, whether you grew up in New York, L.A., London or Jerusalem — they’re classics that have been our Jewish music soundtrack for decades.

Were you at a pre-Tishrei assembly in elementary school the first time you heard “Machnisei Rachamim”? Davening Shacharis in cheder when you learned “Avinu Av Harachaman”? At a lively oneg Shabbos when your friends started singing “Hinei Anochi”? At a kumzitz when everyone closed their eyes as the leader began “Koh amar… zacharti lach chesed ne’urayich”?

Yet most people today, especially the younger generation of music consumers, have no idea that these enduring songs and hundreds more — titles such as “Meheira Hashem,” “Yehei Raava Kadamach,” “Shma Beni Shma Beni,” “Se’u Shearim,” “Yevanim Yevanim,” “Sa-a-meach Tesamach,” “Ner Leragli,” “Usefartem Lachem,” and so many, many others — all came from a little studio in Haifa, sung by a group of cheder kids organized by vintage composer Chaim Banet.

For the last 50-plus years, Banet has served as the official “court composer” of the Seret-Vizhnitz chassidus, creating new niggunim every year for the Yamim Noraim. Many of those niggunim made their way to the 70 (!) albums he’s released together with Moshe Mona Rosenblum — over a dozen of them under the Ranenu Chassidim choir label, the boys’ choir he put together in the early ’70s as director of the local Tzeirei Agudah choir.

Much has been written over the years about this prolific choirmaster and composer, who at 78 still leads the Seret-Vizhnitz cheder boys’ choir out of his son Ruvi Banet’s studio, but does anyone remember that early group of boys — alumni of Chinuch Atzmai’s Toras Emes cheder in Haifa and now men in their fifties and sixties — who sang on the early Ranenu Chassidim albums?

We gathered a minyan of them together to reconnect with Reb Chaim and relive those early, heady days, when their young voices could be heard harmonizing out of every frum family’s open window.

The oldest former choir member of our little reunion is Shaul Chasdiel, 61, owner of Sinai insurance agency in Bnei Brak.

“I was ten years old when Reb Chaim came to school and recruited children to join his choir. I wound up singing in the choir until my bar mitzvah,” he says. “I remember the trips to the first recording in Mona Rosenblum’s studio. Reb Chaim came to school to choose the children who would come to the recording. We traveled on a small bus — it was called a tiyulit — with long benches running across the length. Later, Reb Chaim opened his studio in Kriyat Vizhnitz in Haifa and we began recording there.”

Reb Shaul’s two younger brothers followed him, excited to be on the recordings that came out just about every year. Yair Chasdiel, 53, lives in Tel Aviv and is a judge on the Bat Yam Magistrate’s Court. He was in the choir from 1980 to 1984.

“The most impressive thing about Reb Chaim was his quiet, gentle leadership, his ability to be extremely professional and produce the highest level of music, and still to do it in such a refined way,” says the judge. “Back then, of course, I knew nothing about the challenges of directing a children’s choir. After I auditioned, Reb Chaim offered to make me a soloist, but I was so nervous that I refused. But Reb Chaim never pressured, never wanted to make us feel uncomfortable, so he went over to another boy, and he became a soloist while I missed the chance. But I was really fine with it. When we performed for the 1983 Siyum HaShas in Yad Eliyahu in front of ten thousand people, that was enough for me. I don’t know how my nerves would have handled a solo there.”

Chaim Banet says he chose the children as long as he felt they had potential. “I wanted to hear how a child sang before he was accepted,” he tells Mishpacha. “I would play the keyboard and the boy would sing. If he was on tune, and he had potential, then we would accept him. Often I’d notice that a boy really could sing, but was either nervous or introverted. That’s just how most children are — they come in very anxious, closed up. But baruch Hashem, in all these years I’ve hardly been off the mark. Slowly, the boys open up, learn how to cope with the fear, and they grow through the choir.

“Even in cases where I noticed that a boy was not so suited to the choir,” he adds, “I would try to find a place for him. It’s really dinei nefashos. So maybe he would stand toward the side, or with a microphone that didn’t work so well.”

Arik Adler, 60, today the treasury officer of the Bnei Brak Municipality and the only Seret-Vizhnitzer chassid in our group, says maybe that’s why he was accepted. “I had some protektziya,” he says, smiling at Reb Chaim. But he’s just being humble. He was the original voice of “Machnisei Rachamim,” the golden-voiced child soloist who put the song on the Yamim Noraim roster all over the world.

It

seems that when one brother joined, the rest often followed. Two other pairs of brothers who’ve joined us for this studio reunion are Rabbi Moshe Gafni (not the Degel HaTorah MK), who for many years was chief rabbi of the Israel Police and today, as a shatnez expert, is the certifying rabbi of the Bagir men’s apparel company; and his younger brother, Rabbi Chanan Gafni, 47, a rosh kollel for monetary halachos and the director of a Nefesh Yehudi kiruv and Jewish studies center in Savyon.

“I’m part of the second generation of the choir, between 1986 and 1992,” Rabbi Chanan Gafni says. “I always felt close to Reb Chaim — he even played at my bar mitzvah — and I also had the privilege of having two of my children in Reb Chaim’s choir. We came full circle when Reb Chaim sang with me together at my daughter’s wedding.”

Baruch Roth, 50, manager of the Refaeli Appliances branch in Elad, says those years in the choir not only taught him how to sing, but to really appreciate the essence of song. His brother Moishy Roth, 41, the youngest member of our group and the only active musician among these choir alumni, is the man behind Menagnim Orchestra and a well-known and much-admired musician in chassidic music circles.

“For me, it’s a little different,” says Moishy, who was part of the choir for five years and a soloist for part of that time. “Reb Chaim doesn’t only evoke childhood memories — we work together to this day.”

While Rabbi Yitzchak Dikman, 60, of Bnei Brak isn’t in the music world himself, this rav, mechanech, baal tefillah and chassan teacher is the father of popular music personalities Yoeli and Ruli Dikman. He was part of the first cohort, in the choir from 1973 to 1976, and appeared on Reb Chaim’s first recording.

Maybe that’s one reason Reb Chaim helped out conductor and arranger Yoeli Dikman when he was starting out. “I owe a huge thank-you to Chaim Banet,” Yoeli told Mishpacha. “When I was very early on in my career, he let me into his studio to learn up close about the world of recording, and he once even agreed to let me borrow the most expensive microphone in his studio, which we used to record ‘Chavivin Alai’ on Yosef Chaim Shwekey’s second album.”

With his radiophonic voice, it’s no surprise that chareidi radio journalist Bentzy Leizerovitz, 50, was in a choir as a child — he was part of Chaim Banet’s choir from 1985-1988. The Givat Zeev resident recently retired from Radio Kol Chai after 20 years as a police reporter, yet continuing his positions as director of the country’s chareidi bus lines on behalf of Egged, and as a ZAKA volunteer.

“I remember my first audition,” Reb Bentzy recalls. “Reb Chaim would ask the boy which song he wanted to sing, and I said I wanted to sing ‘Shema Koleinu.’ And he said, ‘Are you sure?’ — because it had high notes. But I insisted, and he enjoyed it very much.

“On Pesach, there was always the big rally on Motzaei Yom Tov of the first day in the Great Synagogue in Haifa, sort of like a second Seder. It was a major event in the city, and Reb Chaim would bring the choir to perform there. And the feeling Reb Chaim gave us, each one of us, was one of empowerment and ability. He would divide the soloists between the songs, one role for each boy. He told me I’d be the soloist for ‘Yehudim Heim Bnei Melachim,’ and I prepared for weeks. It was a big responsibility given to a small boy, with encouragement and chizuk, and that’s something I’ll never forget.”

Rabbi Bentzion Tzioni, 54, serves as a dayan on the rabbinical courts in Ashkelon and Ashdod. His father was the chief rabbi of Afula, but as there was no satisfactory chinuch there at the time, the boys in the family traveled to Haifa for cheder. For some of the time, they lived with their uncle in Kfar Chassidim, not too far away. He and his four younger brothers were part of the choir over the years.

“I think singing in front of those huge audiences, like the Siyum HaShas in Yad Eliyahu in front of thousands of people, gave me a lot of confidence to stand in front of a crowd,” he says.

Ahrele Friedman, 56, is another choir alumnus who traveled to the Haifa cheder, as he lived in nearby Kiryat Ata. After the late-night concerts, he would often sleep in the Banet house.

“I remember when Reb Chaim brought me to sing at a wedding of  Seret-Vizhnitz Rebbe,” he says. “It was very special, but I’ll admit it wasn’t always easy, because we had to learn to sing with the chassidish pronunciation.”

He says his most significant memory of those years was the cornerstone laying for the new city of Emmanuel.

“We sang ‘Bayom Hahu Yushar Hashir Hazeh,’ and I remember Arik Sharon landing there in a helicopter while we were singing.”

“There’s a special story behind this song, and it moves me every time I think about it,” Chaim Banet relates. “I was sitting in the office of Motty Zisser a”h of Bnei Brak, the real estate magnate and philanthropist who was behind the creation of Emmanuel. We were hired for the event, and Motty told me that he wanted a new song for it. I was breaking my head about what kind of song to write, what words would be appropriate.

“I couldn’t come up with anything. I walked around for hours, but my mind was blank. I came home to Haifa and told my wife about the task I had been given, but that I just wasn’t coming up with an idea for a song. She said, ‘What’s the problem? Open a Tanach and you’ll surely find something.’ And as we spoke, she went over to the bookcase and took out a Tanach. We opened it randomly, and there in front of us were the words from Yeshayahu (26:1-2): ‘Bayom hahu yushar hashir hazeh b’Eretz Yehudah, ir az lanu yeshuah yashis chomos vacheil. Pischu she’arim veyavo goy tzaddik shomer emunim — On that day, this song shall be sung in the land of Yehudah: The city that was our salvation shall Hashem place for wall and a bulwark. Open the gates, so that a righteous nation, awaiting Hashem’s promise, may enter.’ This song debuted there, and decades later, it’s still beloved, especially in Yehudah and Shomron, but not only.”

“Yep,” says Moishy Roth, “He’s right. I’m still playing it today at lots of yeshivish weddings.”

Chaim Banet was born in 1947 in Romania to Holocaust survivors who came from the town of Klausenburg. When he was just six months old, he and his parents traveled to Eretz Yisrael via Italy on an illegal immigrant ship, but the ship was captured by the British at the Haifa port and the passengers sent to a detention center in Cyprus. Reb Chaim says that when his mother was transferred from the rickety ship to the British destroyer, one of the soldiers took baby Chaim and literally threw him in the air onto the deck of the waiting British carrier. With his mother screaming in the background, luckily there was another soldier on deck whose quick reflexes caught the baby at the last second.

As soon as the State of Israel was declared, the detention camp residents were freed and allowed back into Eretz Yisrael — right into the middle of the War of Independence.

“My father was immediately drafted to the war, while my mother and I were sent to Hadera until the war ended,” Reb Chaim relates.

From Hadera, the family moved to Haifa, where they became close with Rav Baruch Hager, a scion of the Vizhnitz chassidic dynasty who served as rav of the town of Seret before World War II. He survived the war and moved to Eretz Yisrael, where he established the Ramat Vizhnitz neighborhood in Haifa and became known as the Seret-Vizhniter Rebbe. When Rebbe Baruch passed away in 1963, his son Rav Eliezer Hager — who, after being freed from the British prison in Atlit, trained with the Haganah and was even wounded in the War of Independence where he served as a tank commander — became Rebbe, and led the chassidus until his passing in 2015.

When Rebbe Eliezer took the mantle of leadership, the chassidim came under the umbrella of his paternal kindness, his exceptional hasmadah, his vast Torah knowledge, and — as someone who understood the nuances of the complex society around him — his sensitivity and appreciation for every Jew, chareidi or secular.

Meanwhile, Reb Chaim studied at the Novardok yeshivah in Hadera as a bochur and after his marriage worked as a teacher and established a children’s choir.

“I loved to sing, and I would teach niggunim to the children,” Reb Chaim remembers. “One day, I went to the Rebbe ztz”l with a kvittel and he said to me, ‘Chaim, I hear you’re doing good things with music. How do you do it?’ I answered that I just work from the heart, whatever emerges. And when the Rebbe then asked, ‘Do you understand what you’re doing?’ and I responded in the negative, the Rebbe said, ‘Go study, and I’ll pay.’

“The Rebbe didn’t let me attend a music school, but rather that I should find a private teacher. I found a Yid named Moshe Bick who was then in his eighties, a Russian-born Zionist music teacher and composer. The Rebbe insisted on meeting him first, so I brought him to the Rebbe, who gave his approval. Each month I came to the Rebbe with a receipt. The next stage was to produce a recording. I had no how that even worked, but the Rebbe pushed me to it, and when I opened my studio in Haifa, the Rebbe gave me the money to buy the first console.

“I didn’t make a move without the Rebbe,” Reb Chaim continues. “He followed my work, and asked that the songs be sung at tishen — he was my engine to this world of musical creation. Everything that I have is from him.”

In the Seret-Vizhnitz community, the main singing happens around the Rebbe’s tish. “The community gathers around the Rebbe after everyone has completed their seudah at home, and we share hours of divrei Torah and uplifting songs in honor of Shabbos,” Reb Chaim says. “Some of the songs are traditional Vizhnitz Shabbos songs, and some are my own compositions, such as ‘Shabbos Kodesh’ or ‘Ohavei Hashem.’ ”

Baruch Roth remembers how his father would take him to the Rebbe’s tishen from the time he was around four, and how central Chaim Banet’s niggunim were. Later, Baruch, too, would stand in the choir section.

“Reb Chaim would stand behind, conducting the choir,” Baruch Roth remembers. “Most of the tish was based on old Vizhnitzer songs, but there was a point where the Rebbe would give a signal, and the olam started to sing Reb Chaim’s compositions.”

One song the Rebbe considered especially elevated was “Machnisei Rachamim,” taken from one of the concluding sections of Selichos. Reb Chaim, for his part, says the niggun he wrote took on wings in a way he’d never dreamed.

“When we sang it with the choir for the Rebbe on Motzaei Shabbos of Selichos,” Reb Chaim says, “the Rebbe gestured to me, ‘zing es nochamul [sing it again].’ The next day, the Rebbe called me over and told me that some tunes are powerful without words, and there are also words that are so powerful that they need no tune. Here, he said, both the words and the niggun were elevated.

“Back then it was a brand-new composition,” Banet continues. “I myself didn’t even know it was something special. Now, years later, I finally see the koach that the Rebbe understood right away.”

“I remember when his classic songs were born, from a tune hummed at home to a song that would inspire the entire Jewish world,” Reb Chaim’s son Ruvi Banet, a composer and producer in his own right, told Mishpacha. “When I was four or five, Abba would often compose a new song on Shabbos, one part at a time, and we had to help him remember it.”

He says the most amazing thing about his father’s compositions is the way they’ve endured after all these years, even as more modern winds have blown into the industry.

“I work with Abba a lot, because today he records his children’s choir in my studio,” Ruvi related. “Sometimes he sits and learns, right there in the studio, and his seriousness, the way he conducts himself, sets an example for the children and is always there with me. At times I might do more modern work, changing the beats, but Abba is there to watch over me. He might tell me, ‘Es past nisht,’ and I’ll cut it out. The truth is that I’ve also grown out of some of the cutting-edge music I arranged in my twenties. I think that music is not as much a matter of generation as a matter of age. The wilder music is primarily for the youth, but even they grow out of it. I find myself always coming back to Abba.”

I

n keeping with Reb Chaim’s modest style, the choir, even when performing for a packed house, kept to their white-shirt-black-pants-tzitzis-out attire.

“We did a series of performances together with the London School of Jewish Song, first in Heichal Hatarbut in Tel Aviv, and later in Binyanei Ha’uma,” Rabbi Dikman remembers. “There was this undercurrent of competition between the choirs. The London choir had a big show, and we were much simpler. We were wearing our white shirts and black pants, and they came with all these sparkly, showy uniforms. We were just regular Israeli chareidi kids going up there to sing without a lot of fanfare, just simple and genuine, like Reb Chaim’s music.”

Rabbi Dikman says he’d heard that in some of the fancier choirs, boys would be sent off stage if they couldn’t hit the notes. “But with Reb Chaim,” he says, “it was different. You succeeded, you didn’t succeed, it didn’t matter. Reb Chaim was always refined, gentle, without rebuking. And I took this calmness with me into my adult life with my own sons — no pressure, no forced competition.”

And no allusions to anything that could be misconstrued as improper.

“For example,” says Rabbi Dikman, “when Reb Chaim first taught us ‘Usefartem Lachem,’ the high part originally went ‘Sheva, sheva, sheva, Shabbasos temimos…’ But there’s a famous brandy called Sheva Sheva Sheva (777), and it probably amused everyone, so he changed it to ‘Sheva Shabbosos, Shabbosos temimos...’ ”

“When we finished the concerts, we had to go to sleep somewhere at night,” Rabbi Tzioni recalls. “I remember one night, my brother and I were at a performance, and we asked Reb Chaim how we’d get home, and he replied, ‘It will be fine, don’t worry.’ The concert ended and all of us who were not local went to his house in Ramat Vizhnitz and we slept on mattresses his family put out for us.

“And no matter how talented or not you were,” Rabbi Tzioni continues, “Reb Chaim never told a boy not to participate. When someone really wanted to be part of it, he always encouraged, and always managed. He’d put the boy in a place where he could watch over him, and never gave anyone the feeling that he was less than someone else. I think I can speak for all of us in saying that it gave us a tremendous boost of confidence for the future.”

And, say his former charges, he never rebuked. Moishy Roth remembers one afternoon when the boys were in the studio for hours recording a song. “At one point,” he says, “we went out to daven Minchah in the shul, and by mistake, I pressed Record on the reel, and when we came back from Minchah, there was no song. It was pretty devastating, but the main reason I remember it is because of what happened afterward. I expected him to get very angry at me, to send me home. But instead, he went to the grocery and bought me Bamba. He told me, ‘Everything is all right, we’ll record it again.’ And I’ll never forget that.”

And then there was the bonus of the falafel.

“Remember Schechter’s falafel store on Arlozorov Street, in front of Yeshivas Tiferes Yisrael?” Rabbi Dikman asks his old choir friends. “The store belonged to Reb Chaim’s father-in-law, and it was the only kosher l’mehadrin falafel in Haifa at the time. After we finished practicing in the studio, we’d all go eat falafel there. To this day I’m not sure who paid for it.”

Today, these men relate to Chaim Banet with earned deference, but when they were kids, he was just “Chaim.” Not Rebbi Chaim or Reb Chaim, just Chaim.

“One of the melmadim in the school was upset that the boys didn’t call me Moreh Chaim, because in school, everyone was called Moreh or Rebbi. But I insisted that to the choirboys I was just Chaim. I insisted in the afternoon hours to be just Chaim,” Reb Chaim admits.

That humility was part of what made Chaim Banet’s choir a chesed enterprise as much as a vehicle for entertainment.

“We did so many concerts in places where it was a real chesed,” says Rabbi Moshe Gafni. “We would go to mental institutions, where there were all kinds of nebachdig Yidden. We’d go to prisons. And in these places, he was even stricter about the derech eretz we needed to show — more than in the big concerts in Yad Eliyahu. As children, we didn’t understand it, but today, I totally get it: the chinuch for derech eretz in front of the downtrodden. To be serious, to respect them.”

And it didn’t always end there. “I continued these visits when I was a bochur in yeshivah,” says Baruch Roth. “I once even spent Seder night in the hospital. One year, I was asked to lead the Rosh Hashanah davening at Rothschild [Bnai Zion] Hospital in Haifa. I wasn’t sure, because I really didn’t want to miss davening in yeshivah, but my rosh yeshivah urged me to do it. He said, ‘In yeshivah you’ll have Olam Hazeh, but at Rothschild, you’ll have Olam Haba.’ And so, I wound up being the chazzan for all the tefillos. I wasn’t even married yet and I didn’t have a kittel, so I wore a white doctor’s coat instead. But I made sure to incorporate Reb Chaim’s niggunim into the nusach.

 (Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1061)