Re: Four Quesions on Am Yisroel Chai

[Freda B Birnbaum <fbb6...>]

The other day, I wrote:

> 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.

I discovered a few typos in my original post, and in the process my
husband added a few comments as well, so I'm posting the corrected article
instead of just tagging on the comments.  (Any future comments will be
short notes!  Yes... musical notes... sorry!)

Freda Birnbaum

*****************************

"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 18, 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 not 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, the pioneer Jewish nationalist long before
Herzl, who'd coined the term Zionism and later became a pioneer Baal
Teshuva early in the twentieth century, sought a reunion of the two with
his manifesto "Am Hashem".

I believe I may have first heard a version of "Am Yisroel Chai" 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.

More than two decades ago, I was approached by someone who felt that
Titus' Arch in Rome displaying the Roman removal of the ritual objects
from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. was a "busha", a continuing shame
for the Jewish people, and we should find some way of blowing it up.  I
responded that the Romans were long gone but we were still here, truly "Am
Yisroel Chai".  Later, I heard that someone had scratched the term onto
the monument as graffiti.  I hope it is still there!  I was pleased that I
had worked on Shlomo to create the song.

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