Everyone’s Friend

Perhaps the young boy who lingered at the back of the room at the bustling Calek shivah in Golders Green can give a clue. With the house abuzz with people coming and going, he was out of his comfort zone, hesitant to approach the aveilim.

Once the room cleared a little, Duvid Zvi, Yigal’s oldest son, recognized the teenager as a member of his late father’s last choir before the stroke that had incapacitated him. “Come, come take a seat,” Duvid Zvi offered gently. Seated in front of the four Calek brothers, the young fellow opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. So Duvid Zvi prodded him on.

“What did you enjoy about being in the choir?” he asked.

Struggling to convey his feelings, the boy slowly raised his hands, bringing them together until they hung in front of him. “Yigal was, like, into us,” he began haltingly. “He touched our neshamos. He was just such an enjoyable person who took a real interest in us and our lives.” It was a surprising statement, considering the decades-wide age gap.

But the genuine friendship Yigal showed to people of all ages has been a recurring theme following his passing on Chol Hamoed Succos. “He was eighty years old when he was niftar,” says Duvid Zvi, “but do you know how many kids of ten or twelve whom I’ve met over the last few years told me, ‘Your father is my friend?’ And the funny thing is that when I’d tell my father, he would say, ‘Yes, he’s my friend, too.’ It was a two-way relationship.”

Few people today can imagine a second dance without a rousing remade “Mareh Kohein,” the band pausing as the crowd chants “woo-oo-woo-oo.” Or a Tishah B’Av kumzitz without “Al Zeh Hayah,” or a Rosh Hashanah davening without “Chamol.” But as much as people want to hold on to the exciting and original music he created, there’s also a sense of mourning among anyone who came into his orbit. For an interaction with Yigal left an indelible, lifelong impact.

“Which other teacher — fifty years on — do students still feel close to?” asks Duvid Zvi. “From men in their seventies who took part in the earliest choirs, right through to young men from the most recent productions, all relayed the same message: Yigal molded us, understood us, taught us how to present ourselves properly and showed us how to act like a mensch.”

“He wasn’t just a great choir leader and talented composer. He was a mechanech in the truest sense of the word,” says Rabbi Yissochor Lichtig, an early choir member who composed “Yekum Purkon,” featured on the 1971 Borchi Nafshi album.

“Yigal, who was very bold and creative with his music yet had the instinct to combine that with a simplicity that naturally resonates with people, taught us how to feel and how to express those feelings in music. He taught us how to appreciate the emotion-laden words of Navi and how that understanding had to shine out when we performed. He taught us discipline, attention to detail, and how ultimately music should only lead to kevod Shamayim,” says Yanki Kornbluth, who was in the choir from 1988 to 1991, and who eventually became Yigal’s mechutan when his daughter married Duvid Zvi’s son in 2021. Yanki, who currently lives in Antwerp, traveled with the choir on both a US tour and on the Soviet Union tour, and kept up a close relationship with Yigal as a teenager, even though they were a generation apart and he was in yeshivah with Yigal’s sons.

It’s been 40 years since Michael Sacofsky, today a Jerusalem-based attorney who’s been working in the fields of real estate, and commercial and probate law for the last two decades, was in Yigal’s choir.

“I knew at the time that I was part of something very special, really living the dream,” Sacofsky says. “Yigal was the most charismatic person I’ve ever encountered, oozing with energy, light, and unparalleled creativity. The years rolled on, I moved to Israel, got married and got on with life and career — but I was in London a few months ago and fortunately I was able to visit Yigal in hospital. I had to see him to tell him how deeply he had affected me throughout my life. I don’t know if it registered with him, but I’m certain that I’m not alone in feeling this way. I’m still reeling from his passing.”

“Yigal was magnetic, and everyone wanted to be part of his choir and be part of that whole experience,” says former choir member Shloimy Richman (he’s the one playing guitar on the 2021 Chanukah reunion clip). “And you know, as much as he loved and promoted those really confident performers and soloists, he always worked hard to give confidence to the more reserved and weaker boys of the choir.”

Richman, who lives in Golders Green where he works in real estate and is a longtime Hatzolah member, says he joined the choir “under duress” when he was 11. “My family was musical, but I was shy and never enjoyed performing,” he admits, but stayed with the choir for the next three years. He caught up with Yigal again in 1989 when he was newly married and Yigal was putting together an adult alumni choir for a trip to Russia and Ukraine.

In recent years their relationship moved to a whole different level when Shloimy was the first Hatzolah responder on scene when Yigal suffered a stroke. From then on, they spent quality time together at least once a week.

“Yigal gave us an appreciation of how messages in the Torah and davening can be interpreted in song, and I believe that’s the nekudah that made his music so attractive all these years. It wasn’t just about arbitrarily putting words to a melody — it had to be a perfect and meaningful combination. What I learned about Yigal over the years is that yes, he was always the man behind the music and hugely talented, but ultimately, all he ever really wished for was to connect to Hashem and spread that connection wherever he could. Music and song were a huge part of his life, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. For Yigal, it was a pathway that simply facilitated his real, deeper aspirations.”

Yigal, says Shloimy, connected intensely to his past, from his parents’ home in Poland, growing up in the poverty of Tel Aviv in the early years of the state, and finally to his life in London.

“It was part of his very being, and it reflected in many of his compositions,” he says of the passionate ideologue that lay beneath the larger-than-life personality and extroverted stage presence. “Songs with purity and emotion, a journey from sad and troubled beginnings, but also full of hope and emunah for the future. And ultimately, people love to connect to what’s real and pure, and Yigal facilitated that through his music and song. Today, people worldwide are still connecting to those reunion clips, which have somehow transported them back to the world they remember growing up in.”

Echoes from the Past

To understand who my father was you need to go back to the beginning,” says Duvid Zvi, “because his own past and family history was an inseparable part of who he was and how he thought.”

Yigal’s father, Aharon Calek, came from a family of Gerrer chassidim from Pabianice, a Gerrer stronghold near Lodz. The rav was Rav Mendele Alter, a brother of the Imrei Emes, and one Friday night, as he stood outside the shtibel with his chassidim, a young Polish gentile cut through the crowd, approached the rav, and slapped him across his face. The crowd froze.

Aharon Calek would not tolerate his beloved rav humiliated in this way, and seeing that nobody had moved, he instinctively struck the gentile to the ground. For fear of him being arrested and having to face a Polish army draft board, the crowd shouted, “Aharon, loif! Run!”

And run he did, through towns and villages, and across borders, eventually arriving in Palestine in 1937 on an illegal ship.

That sensitivity to Jewish pride and readiness to act was something that Yigal imbibed as a young child and shaped his outlook on standing up for what was important in life.

Yigal was born in Eretz Yisrael and grew up during the years of the ma’abarot, the immigration camps for Jews from Yemen. The secular authorities were determined to wrest these Jews away from their heritage, but Aharon Calek knew he had to do whatever he could to remind these Jews of where they came from.

“My father always remembered going one Friday afternoon with his father to one of the ma’abarot,” says Duvid Zvi. “They brought along challah, wine, a folding table and a white tablecloth. Right there in the camp, with curious eyes watching, he set up a Shabbos table and invited the women to light Shabbos candles. He remembered the gasps of the women and children as they looked at the table saying, ‘Wow, Shabbat, wow, Shabbat.’ ”

While that visit taught him a lesson in principles, it also ignited a small flame that, with time, would because a roaring fire. As he observed Jews unfairly deprived of their mesorah, there stirred within him a strong desire to restore pride in living authentically Jewish, a mission that would shape his personality and in turn, his lifelong musical endeavors. Especially close to his heart was the plight of Russian Jewry, who had been so cruelly deprived of their Jewish heritage by the Communist regime for seven decades.

Another grandfather was Reb Duvid Zvi Dorembus, a temimusdige tzaddik of a man who earned a living as a melamed. Although the family was destitute, he saved up kopek by kopek to have a special pair of boots made at the cobbler. They weren’t for wearing though — the boots were set aside for when they would go to Eretz Yisrael. Although when they finally arrived in Eretz Yisrael, he realized that the boots weren’t needed, the idealism to live higher was something that Yigal inherited.

“Although my father became a quite sophisticated person, he still retained the pashtus of his forebears and this came out in his music,” says Duvid Zvi. “To Daddy, music was a holy calling. The kids in the choir told us that if they’d touched their shoes during a rehearsal, he would send them out to wash their hands. ‘You’re singing pesukim now,’ he would tell them. ‘It’s a meleches hakodesh!’ ”

“Daddy always involved us in what he was doing, giving us the feeling that he genuinely enjoyed our company. When we were little children, he would often take us with him on visits to people’s homes,” recounts Menachem Calek of his father, the ultimate people connector. “I was a little boy, but I could sense the excitement, the warmth and friendship he created when he walked into a room.”

Yigal always showed a deep interest in the lives of others, both young and old. And he connected to all types of people — the chassidishe rav, the balabatishe Yid, as well as the typical English family from Hampstead.

Indeed, his first port of call in passing on that legacy of caring, compassion, and connecting with others were his own children.

“I remember when I was going to camp for the first time, my father took me aside and taught me a lesson for life,” says Shuly Mashiach, Yigal’s only daughter. She was a sociable girl with lots of friends — but her father wanted to make sure she included others, too.

“If you want to have an amazing time in camp,” Yigal told her, “make sure everyone around you is happy, too.”

“At family simchahs, too, we had to do what no other child our age was expected to,” recounts Shuly. Yigal instructed his children — some of them barely in their teens — to circulate among the guests, show people their seats, offer them drinks and make sure everyone was comfortable.

That’s the Pshat

If restoring Jewish pride was the mission, then for Yigal Calek, joyous Jewish music whose words imparted that message was certainly part of the answer. Soon after his marriage to Adina Goldman of Antwerp in 1967, the dynamic young man bursting with creativity began teaching limudei kodesh at a Jewish school in nearby Brussels, working with children who came from loosely affiliated Jewish families. It was but one of many teaching jobs he held in schools over decades.

Teaching Sefer Shoftim, the class reached Chapter 5, Shiras Devorah. Sensing the challenge in imparting the complicated words of the pesukim and their powerful message in a meaningful way, Yigal retired to the staff room to brainstorm. The answer came in the form of his famous piece “Shimu Melachim,” which was later recorded on London Pirchim’s first album, Ma Navu.

“Yigal was my first limudei kodesh teacher and I always considered him my rebbi,” says Dr. Robert Lederman, today a popular Jerusalem optometrist and a leader in the field of developmental optometry and vision therapy, and who is also founder of the Pirchei Efrat children’s choir, to which he credits Yigal. “I was always energized by his energy, by his extraordinary love of being a Jew and of his deep desire to bring you into it. I was in his choir, and we stayed in touch for the last fifty-three years.

“He was the only adult I knew with whom we were on first-name basis, which was a big deal then in the UK. I’m sure some people thought his enthusiasm was a bit over the top, but he never saw it that way. For him, it was how a Jew should be, and he never let it get knocked out of him. And that’s how he actually put us on planes, and on records, and on stages in the US and Europe.”

For his on-stage productions, Yigal became renowned for his elaborate and original choreography. But those weren’t just any dance moves — they came with a message.

“I don’t think you can separate my father’s music from the choreography,” says Menachem Calek. “He enveloped the audience in the experience. For ‘Shimu Melachim,’ he arranged the boys to line up in the shape of a chariot, and he positioned himself standing at the top of the chariot bellowing out on the hill ‘Anochi LaHashem ashirah!’ You literally saw the whole battle scene unfolding right in front of your eyes.”

Once, when Yigal was visiting New York, a son-in-law of Telshe Rosh Yeshivah Rav Mordechai Gifter came to see him. “My father-in-law listened again and again to your ‘Shimu Melachim,’ ” he related, “and he would say, ‘Dos heist op-geteitched a navi — that’s the way to interpret a navi.’ ”

Russian Roulette

Yigal’s childhood experience observing Jews wrongfully deprived of their Yiddishkeit helped him identify even more strongly with the plight of Soviet Jewry, trapped behind the Iron Curtain and stripped of any vestige of Yiddishkeit.

“The enforced silence endured by the Jews of Russia affected my father deeply,” says Menachem. “He wanted so badly to give them expression.”

Those were the years of the growing movement in the West to protest on behalf of the Jews of Russia, and Yigal gave it his own expression with the production of the haunting song “Children of Silence” in 1971. But it wouldn’t be until the end of the next decade that Yigal’s angst over his trapped Jewish brethren would find tangible expression.

Doody Rosenberg, an early choir member, composer, and close friend of Yigal for over 55 years, remembers how the maiden trip to the USSR came about.

“Agudath Israel of America was always on the lookout for innovative ways to reach Russian Jews,” he remembers. “They realized that Jewish music could be a positive medium, and that a children’s choir could really penetrate people’s hearts.”

The Agudah had funding and they approached Yigal, who was instantly sold on the idea. “This opportunity was the realization of so many of my father’s ideals,” says Duvid Zvi. “He was being handed an opportunity to connect with estranged Yidden and show them some of the beauty of Yiddishkeit.”

And so in April 1989, Yigal and a small troupe of six choir boys and six adults made the trip. With a full schedule of concerts, their shows were instant hits. “These were no mere concerts,” says Doody Rosenberg. “They were vehicles to reach Yidden in a very deep way.”

And the impact was massive. When the boys paraded through the packed auditorium following a show, people in the audience reached out simply to touch them, not believing that frum Jewish children still existed outside of their locked-in world.

One episode during that first trip cemented Yigal’s reputation as a fearless advocate for his people. Yigal would often preface a song with a small speech, giving the background and context to the pesukim or the words of Chazal on which the song was built. In pre-glastnost Russia, those mini talks took on a whole new meaning as the shows provided a platform to impart some important Torah teachings to crowds of two or three thousand each time.

Although the adults in Yigal’s group were anxious about his very un-Russian overt kiruv efforts, Yigal went ahead, undeterred. “The microphone once went off once during a speech,” Duvid Zvi remembers, “and we would see uniformed men backstage. It was nerve-racking.”

During the intermission of one show, the director of the concert hall arrived backstage accompanied by a small delegation, asking to speak to Mr. Calek. She was shown to Yigal’s dressing room, where, smilingly and with trademark warmth and graciousness, he invited her to take a seat, as if he had no greater pleasure in the world at that time than to host her.

The woman eyed the choir leader with seriousness. “Mr. Calek,” she said, “this not synagogue. Only music, no speaking.”

Yigal didn’t blink. “Have you heard of Charlie Chaplin?” he asked her. “Imagine you invite him to do a show without his hat, stick, mustache, and funny walk.”

“This not Charlie Chaplin,” the woman retorted, not understanding.

“Of course,” replied Yigal, “but my songs without my introductions is not Yigal Calek and the London School of Jewish Song.”

“Mr. Calek, you very clever man,” said the director, and with her entourage, turned on her heels and left.

“He was playing with fire,” says Duvid Zvi, “but he was clear about his vision: His mission was worthless if he’d forfeit the opportunity to spread devar Hashem to the masses.”

Following that initial trip, Yigal was more fired up than ever. As thirsty as Russian Jewry were for his message, he was equally keen and itching to give it to them. And then he saw a golden opportunity beckoning.

He came up with a plan to spend the entire Yom Tov of Succos in Russia. But this time, he wouldn’t just take the choir; he set out to transport a mini-kehillah of 50 people, complete with families, older people, and of course the choir boys — a mammoth logistical task. His mission was to showcase to Russian Jewry the vibrancy and beauty of Jewish life.

Barely six months after his first trip, they were on their way. Although the Iron Curtain was yet to fall, this was during the last breath of Communism, when the government showed an increasing openness and conciliation to the West.

For the sheltered London children who lived in frum communities, it was an eye-opener. “At the shul in St. Petersburg they were using a microphone on Yom Tov,” remembers Doody Rosenberg, who travelled with the group. “On Yom Tov I saw people handing Yizkor nedavos to the gabbai, who then pocketed it.”

The young choir boys from Golders Green saw beggars on the steps of the Leningrad shul asking for nedavos on Shabbos, which was in stark contrast to their own fortunate backgrounds and religious education.

But that didn’t stop the group from being the talk of the town — both during the Yom Tov tefillos in shul, and during Chol Hamoed, when they put on several sellout concerts.

“The shuls in Moscow and St. Petersburg were overflowing, with people standing outside trying to get in,” Doody relates. After the davening, the choir put on an impromptu concert, around which all the Yidden in the shul gathered, some of them having traveled for hours to take part.

Doniel Goldberg remembers going to the Great Synagogue of Moscow, the only place that religion was permitted to be practiced. There were crowds of people there, and elderly Russian women, seeing Jewish boys carrying a lulav and esrog, reached out to touch them with tears streaking their cheeks.

As for the concerts, they were sold out within 24 hours of the advertisements going up. “You couldn’t get a ticket — even on the black market,” Doody relates. “People were simply thirsting for the word of Hashem. They felt something big was going on inside that connected them to their Jewish identity. To see the sweet, young choir boys singing Jewish songs, in Hebrew, was beyond — especially for the Holocaust survivors.”

During one show, Yigal brought one of the young families that accompanied the trip onto the stage holding their young children, just to show the audience that beyond their restricted lives there lived thriving Jewish communities in which families were being built and people lived happy, fulfilled lives.

And then Yigal decided to recreate a Friday night Shabbos seudah right there on stage — and Doody was chosen to make Kiddush in front of the thousands of people in the audience.

They began with singing Shalom Aleichem and Eishes Chayil, just like a Jewish family would sing at home. And then came Doody’s big moment. With Yigal’s son Yoel accompanying softly on the piano, Doody raised the kos and closed his eyes.

“I felt that something very profound was occurring,” he remembers. “The atmosphere was electrifying. Then, when I dared open my eyes to peer at thousands of eyes in the audience, there was absolute silence, and several tearful elderly Yidden were murmuring the word, ‘Shabbes, Shabbes.’ But sadly, the younger people had no clue what they were looking at.”

In a carefully planned move that followed, Yigal ventured off the stage with the choir and ran out into the audience with the children. And the elderly folk lifted their hands, simply wanting to see the children close up. There were tears streaming down their faces. They couldn’t believe that they would ever see frum Jewish children again.

Think Positive

Yigal exuded positivity at every step. He was always smiling, always upbeat. But those who knew him well knew that it didn’t come without work. Avrumi Calek relates a childhood memory from a summer road trip through Europe, when the Calek family ended up sleeping overnight at a parking lot on the Austria-Germany border.

“Very early in the morning there was a knock on the window, and standing next to the car was a huge blond and blue-eyed officer,” says Avrumi. When Yigal lowered the window, the man informed them that it was illegal to park there. “Das ist verboten,” he said, banishing the family from the area.

“For the next few hours,” says Avrumi, “I remember Daddy driving, gripping the wheel with intensity, anger, and indignation.”

For Yigal, his mind flashed back to his own experience growing up around survivors. Reb Aharon Calek had suffered the loss of his entire family and spoke very little of what he endured. But Yigal caught a glimpse of his father’s pain when, as a 13-year-old boy in London, his father took him to Madame Tussauds, where waxwork models of famous people are on display. Reb Aharon was a chassidishe Yid; heading into central London wasn’t generally on his agenda.

They walked around the corridors of the venue, Yigal’s hand in the firm grip of his father, until they arrived at a model of Hitler yemach shemo. The elder Calek stood and stared, his grip on Yigal’s hand squeezing stronger and stronger.

“Daddy was scared,” says Duvid Zvi. “He felt like his father was about to explode from anger and excess emotion, and he called out, “Abba, Abba!” But his father was someplace else. He couldn’t even hear him. Until his father abruptly said, ‘Let’s go home.’ ”

Duvid Zvi gained a glimpse into what his father felt when he returned from leading a Poland trip. “What did you feel when you went to Auschwitz?” Yigal asked him. “I’ll tell you what I felt when I went,” he continued, “I felt humiliated.”

“Which was interesting,” says Duvid Zvi,” because this was a chiddush to me. It wasn’t a reflection I heard from people who’d visited Poland. But for my father, he felt the “la’ag v’keles bagoyim” very keenly — and that made him a man on a mission.

“The non-Jews can have all their pomp, their palaces and their fanfare. But that wasn’t glory in my father’s book. For him, his life’s mission was restoring Jewish pride, joy, majesty and glory, all al pi ruach haTorah. His mission was “Shimu melochim, haazinu roznim, anochi laHashem ashirah.”

Even as one part of him grappled with the loss, another part of him sought to bring forward hope and healing.

“Daddy moved the trend from singing ‘Ani Maamin’ as a sad dirge to one that is upbeat and confident,” says Menachem. “The song is a march, sending the message of a proud and determined nation looking forward decisively toward a brighter future. And he ended every show with that message.”

The Smile Said It All

When all is said and done, Yigal’s impact was perhaps felt the most among his beloved choir boys through his unique relationship with them.

“Yigal treated me in the very same adult mode when I was an eleven-year-old choir boy as he related to me when we were both grandfathers,” says Doody Rosenberg. “He respected the children immensely, he made them feel valued, he even asked their opinion on the songs and the harmonies. That respect was his winning formula that created people’s lifelong admiration for him.”

Doody experienced that respect first hand when, as an 18-year-old, he played to Yigal what he thought was a mediocre composition, ‘Hamalach Hagoel.’ “Yigal listened, lifted his head up, and there was a faraway look in his eyes,” Doody remembers, “as if he was picturing the scene of Yaakov Avinu giving the brachos to his children. ‘Wow, this is big,’ Yigal said. ‘This is big.’ ”

The song would eventually join Doody’s other compositions on the 1978 Tenth Anniversary Celebration album, but for Doody, the fact that Yigal encouraged him and endorsed his compositions imbued him with a surge of confidence.

Yet the respect Yigal showed the boys was a double-edged sword, because the choir leader also had grown-up expectations of his young charges — all with a view to building their confidence and helping them develop.

Avi Goldberg, a second-generation soloist on the later 1997 Mama album (and on Avrumi Flam’s kumzitz classic Tov Lehodos), remembers the daunting experience of auditioning for a solo in front of 25 friends at rehearsals. “It built your confidence up, and anyway, there was no choice in the matter,” Avi says. “We knew it came from the right place, and our fathers had been through it, too!”

Avi’s father Stephen was a member of the adult choir at Yigal’s HASC 6 concert, and Avi can be seen as a toddler sitting on his father’s shoulders in one of the famous pictures of the Succos trip to Russia.

Yigal was also an exacting perfectionist who knew precisely what he wanted. “As a young kid facing that, it was a little scary,” Avi recalls. “We were pampered Golders Green kids and suddenly we had a disciplinarian standing in front of us. He would tell us straight out if we didn’t get it right.”

But it was always tempered with love. “Yigal had his own exquisite balance of yad yemin and yad smol,” says Rabbi Joel Portnoy, an early-70s choir member and soloist on the “Tzitzis” (Borchi Nafshi) album.

For Avi, his choir experience helped him mature. One time they were on tour in Eretz Yisrael and after having sung solos at a spate of concerts, Avi’s voice had given way. But Yigal refused to give his solo away.

“Yigal didn’t see two ways about it — it was my solo and so I had to sing it,” Avi remembers. “It taught me about responsibility and priorities.”

And it wasn’t just about singing, as Avi learned in the lead-up to a US concert tour in 2000. “At one rehearsal before the trip, Yigal told us we’re not singing anything today. He explained that we needed to learn how to be good guests at the homes we would be staying at, and he proceeded to spend the entire rehearsal teaching us the ‘Yehi Ratzon’ that a guest says for their host in bentshing. I can still repeat it word for word.”

For Yigal, though, it wasn’t just about making sure his choir was well-behaved on foreign soil. “A relationship with Yigal was fully immersive — it was a living symphony of music, color, taste, personality, and vibrancy,” says Rabbi Naftali Schiff, a kiruv visionary and founder and CEO of Jewish Futures, executive director of Aish UK, and founder of JRoots. “Even as a ten-year-old at Sunday choir practice, we felt the genuine bond that came from treating us as adults with genuine interest, with his unique mixture of charisma and control. And it worked because his Torah, his music, his imagination, his meshalim and his relationships were real. Even his choreography and costumes were a genuine expression of connection with something much deeper. It wasn’t a job. It was life. It was real. It was authentic. And authenticity transcends everything.”

As demanding as he was, when it came to performing on stage, Yigal was acutely aware of the nerves his young charges would feel. “I still vividly remember the Brooklyn College concert in 1970,” says Rabbi Portnoy. “Yigal imbued us with confidence to perform well in what would otherwise have been a completely overwhelming setting.”

“Yigal had an uncanny ability to relax the choir when he entered the stage,” says Doody Rosenberg. “I remember the smile he gave as we started a performance. That smile told us, ‘I have every confidence that you’ll put on a phenomenal show.’ ”

Yigal might have been a perfectionist, but the respect he commanded was deserved. “Yigal brought me out of my shell,” says Yosi Klein of Golders Green, who was with the choir in the mid to late 70s and is today a businessman dealing with office furniture and products. “He taught me how to stand straight. How to listen. How to sing. How to appreciate harmonies. How to smile. How to perform in front of audiences with expectations. How to get rid of my shyness. How to conduct an orchestra and a choir. And how to enjoy and appreciate the moments. I always eagerly awaited those Sunday afternoon rehearsals.

“In later years,” Yosi continues, “he taught me to be always thanking Hashem… and I will always be indebted to Yigal for this — not as Yigal the performer, but as Yigal, my mentor.”

And as the recent reunion kumzitz showed, Yigal succeeded in creating a lifelong camaraderie among the choir. “Just look at all those balding zeides singing and clapping along, transported back to a special place in their childhood,” Doody Rosenberg says.

All for One

There were so many facets to Yigal: the performer, the composer, the choreographer, the arranger. But ask Yigal how he saw himself, and you’ll hear a different story altogether.

“There is so much that we — Am Yisrael — can offer in the field of music, and art and drama and joy,” Yigal told the audience when he was invited up to the stage at the HASC 25 concert in 2012. “As I stand before you, my heart trembles. You, the performers of this show, remember, as you stand on these boards and even in your own private lives, remember always kevod Shamayim. You have a responsibility to this generation. Live up to it.

“And you, my precious friends in the auditorium, keep the music going. Do not let it die, for the sake of our children, keep their Jewish hearts beating to the rhythm of the melodies of the true Jewish spirit. And yes, make it attractive and glorious and sensational as you have done it tonight so it outshines the hollow sparkle of the world outside.”

Gedalia Guttentag contributed to this report.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1037)