Re: Four Quesions on Am Yisroel Chai

[Freda B Birnbaum <fbb6...>]

Our friend Shulamith Berger has graciously forwarded the discussion on "Am
Yisroel Chai", and my husband has asked me to post this response which
should clarify some items.

Thanks to all for the interesting material!  And now I'm enjoying the list
as well.

Freda Birnbaum, fbb6 (at) columbia(dot)edu

+++++

"Am Yisroel Chai" -- Shlomo Carlebach's Version and Earlier Versions

by Jacob Birnbaum
Founder and Director
Center for Russian Jewry with Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry
May 13, 2003


My good friend, Shulamith Berger, has drawn my attention to Gavriel
Bellino's inquiry on the Jewish-Music list, "Four Questions on Am
Yisroel Chai".

After initiating the grass-roots movement for Soviet Jewry with the
creation of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in April 1964, I
strove to generate movement songs (now assembled in "Songs of Hope for
Russian Jews", originally "Songs of Protest for Russian Jews").

Our dear friend Cantor Sherwood Goffin became the first troubadour of
these songs, sang some of them in the Soviet Union in 1970 and recorded
some of them in the record "The New Slavery".

I was determined to get one from Shlomo Carlebach.  We knew each other
and our grandfathers had become acquainted in 1897 at the first Zionist
Congress in Basle, Switzerland.  His zaide, Rabbiner Arthur Cohn, was
Rabbi in Basle and my zaide Dr. Nathan Birnbaum was elected to be the
first Zionist Secretary-General.

Shlomo was constantly on the move and hard to pin down.  His mother
Rebbetzin Paula Carlebach was most helpful in forwarding my requests
for a song "Am Yisroel Chai".  The request began to resonate with him
when he flew to Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.  Later he told me that
he had washed my letter, typed on "Student "Struggle" stationery, down
the airplane toilet in some trepidation.

He first sang the song to a group of Prague youngsters.  I did not know
about this at the time but had continued to press Rebbetzin Carlebach
that he should have something ready for our great Jericho march of
Sunday April 4, 1965.  Late on Friday afternoon April 2nd, my phone
rang and Shlomo's exhausted voice said, "Yankele, I've got it for you!"

Jericho Sunday dawned bright and sunny.  We encircled the Soviet UN
Mission on East 67th Street in New York, Jericho style, to the
trumpeting of seven shofars blown seven times and marched to the UN.
Shlomo was inspired and for the first time publicly sang what was to
become a contemporary Jewish liberation anthem.  Even Irving Spiegel,
the usually kvetchy New York Times correspondent, basked in the
pervasive joyful spirit of the moment.

Shlomo had added another phrase "Od Ovinu Chai" with which he climaxed
the song on a high note of exaltation.  He took this from the Biblical
Yosef's exclamation about his father Yaakov.  I would say that this was
the culmination of Shlomo's first musical period, which I would call
his "Neshomo" period, marking the revival of popular Jewish religious
music after the destruction of the great East European reservoir of
popular Jewish music during the Holocaust.  I well remember the
barrenness of the Jewish music scene in the post World War II years.
It was Shlomo who revived the Ovinu consciousness in the latter 1950s.

When I brought Shlomo into the Soviet Jewry liberation movement, he
entered his second musical phase -- a preoccupation with the physical
rescue of the Jewish people and Israel, the "Guf" phase, one might say.
After the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, he went to the
Wall and sang the new song of liberation but now in reverse order.
Now he began with a high triumphant "Od Ovinu Chai" with "Am Yisroel"
in second place.

This also pointed to his third phase, which I'd call his "Mikdosh"
phase.  He had not been well and in 1994, my wife and I went to daven
Slichos with him at his shul.  Avoiding his more usual sentimental
discursive style, he spoke brilliantly and deeply about contemporary
spiritual challenges and then the service got under way.

In his later years, young Hasidim had become enchanted with him.  Many
such were present and the scene became religiously electric, the
davenen becoming ever more intense with his microphone-aided voice
soaring ecstatically over it all.  I was startled and moved and faces
all around me were lit up in fervor.  As we left, I said to my wife,
"This was a Mikdosh experience and Shlomo's essence."

Shlomo had expanded beyond the striving for the redemption of the
individual soul to the physical redemption of Am Yisroel and finally
penetrated to the holy core of Jerusalem's Mikdosh.

Shortly thereafter, Shlomo passed on.

In sum, with his early neoclassic melodies, he responded to the
yearnings of younger post-Holocaust generations to reach into their
Jewish roots, to hold on and rebuild their Jewish identity.  He was
responding to something even larger than a physical Holocaust, to the
pervasive thinning and disintegration of Jewish identity in recent
centuries.

That is why he later responded to another of my requests, to compose a
song of Jewish resistance and renaissance in the Soviet Union.  I asked
him for a rendering of the Psalmic "lo omus ki echyeh" -- "I will not
die but live"  (also to be found in "Songs of Hope for Russian Jews").
This covered my Soviet Jewry slogan "Let My People Go!  Let My People
Know!"  "Lo omus" did nor take hold in the same way as "Am Yisroel
Chai", but "Let My People Know" was appropriated by a number of
outreach groups.

But in his mind and heart one might say that Shlomo's greatest passion
was "Let My People Rejoice!"  Job cried out that "Man is born to
trouble as the sparks fly upward!"  Shlomo's preference was surely to
overcome and supplant the pessimistic "born to sorrow" with an ecstatic
"born to joy!"

As to the origins of the term "Am Yisroel Chai", the discussion of
Cantor Sam Weiss of Paramus on the Internet mailing list
jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org (post of April 29, 2003) fits my experience
very well.  Biblical Israel spoke of "Amcho" or "Ami" -- HaShem's
People.  Much later, the Hasidim made much use of the term "Dein Folk
Yisruel".  In modern times this became "Dus Yiddishe Folk", separating
the Jewish entity from its Divine originator and partner.  It figures
that the concept of an independent "Am" was the expression of a modern
Jewish nationalist consciousness -- Zionism. Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, a
pioneer Baal Teshuva of the early twentieth century, sought reunion of
the two with his manifesto "Am Hashem".

I believe I may have first heard a version in the 1930s during the rise
of the Nazis as an expression of Jewish national defiance and hope.  A
version appeared in a German Zionist song book, another was sung in the
D. P. camps after Word War II.  When Golda Meir became the first
Israeli Ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s, she walked to the synagogue
on the first Sabbath, great crowds gathered and shouts of "Am Yisroel
Chai" were heard.  As the Soviet Jewish resistance movement developed,
the distinguished Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler composed his own version.
When I enlisted Shlomo's aid in 1964, none of these versions were
current.

+++++

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+