“It’s still an almost magical feeling to find the perfect words to clothe the message of a tune”

Although GERSHY MOSKOWITS has been in the industry for over 20 years, using his talented musical ear first as an album producer then as an event producer, he says it’s still an almost magical feeling to find the perfect words to clothe the message of a tune.

“Sometimes you sit with a composer and a tune emerges, and afterward, you open a sefer or a siddur to find just the right words,” he says. “At other times, I could be davening when the deeper meaning of certain words strikes me. I fold over the edge of the page, and later go to a composer to come up with a niggun.”

Moskowits, who produced over 30 albums for singers such as Shloime Gertner, Yisroel Werdyger, Rabbi Shloime Taussig, and also for Shragee Gestetner a”h, remembers once coming to veteran composer Yossi Green with words he had copied down on a scrap of paper from a sign above a patient’s bed in the hospital.

“I was once visiting a cancer patient, and I saw above his bed a quote from a sefer of the Maharal which read, ‘Hu Yisbarach oseh nissim lechol habotchim bo [The Blessed One does miracles for all those who believe in Him].’ I jotted down those powerful words, and when I came to Yossi, I told him that I had a new singer and a new album project, and we wanted a song with these words.” The first part of the song was composed then and there.

A short while later Yossi Green was in London and made his way to meet Moskowits at the home of that emerging singer, a young fellow named Shloime Gertner. Green travelled to the meeting by subway and alighted just a few minutes before three trains on the subway network were simultaneously bombed by a terrorist. Green felt his own personal neis as he completed writing the song “NISIM,” the title track of Gertner’s 2007 debut album in 2007 that Moskowits produced and coordinated.

Recently, when Moskowits celebrated the vach-nacht the night before the bris of his first son, Shloime Gertner flew in to New York to sing and join the simchah of his producer and friend. They were joined by a very special guest, Reb Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin.

“Reb Sholom Mordechai said that he came out of hakaras hatov for that song about the nissim Hashem does for those who believe in Him,” says Moskowits. “Reb Sholom Mordechai sang Shloime’s song every day that he was incarcerated, and he sang it when he came out of the prison truck, in shackles, to attend each of his court cases. He was so grateful that the song had uplifted him and fortified his bitachon that he came to celebrate with us.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 927)