Rumenishe Shtiklekh: klezmer music among the Hasidim in contemporary Israel

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Joel Rubin

My research was made possible due to the confluence of several events: in addition to my contact with MB, who has been an active wedding musician since the late 1950s, I was fortunate to have met a young hasidic informant at the beginning of my first trip. This informant is a knowledgeable amateur collector of nigunim (hasidic melodies) and klezmer tunes.(3) He happened to know virtually all of the wedding musicians in the hasidic communities of Jerusalem and Bnei Brak and was able and willing to introduce me to them. And, perhaps most importantly, I had something to offer them in return. Namely, they wanted to learn from me as much as I wanted to learn from them. Without the latter, I do not think pursuing fieldwork among these musicians would have been possible; certainly the results would have come much more slowly. What I could offer them was to teach them Eastern European and American klezmer repertoire as well as clarinet and stylistic techniques. In addition to that, they wanted to teach me their tunes, so that I would perform them both in Israel and abroad, thus perpetuating and spreading the Israeli hasidic tradition.(4)

During my two trips I was able to meet many of the leading "hasidic" wedding clarinetists. Of these, seven are Hasidim, one is Haredi but not hasidic, and one, MB, is a religious Zionist but has a lot of connections to the hasidic and other Haredi communities.(5)

My research consisted of interviewing musicians and music aficionados and playing with them in their homes or at the homes of their acquaintances. This also included less formal conversations, which were not taped. I attended simkhes (celebrations) including weddings, as well as gatherings during simkhes bes ha shoyve (Simhat Bet ha-Sho'evah) and simkhes toyre (Simhat Torah), some of which I also played at. These all took place in Jerusalem and its outskirts, in Bnei Brak and in Tel Aviv, with the exception of an interview with MB, which took place at his home on the West Bank. I also attended and performed at several festivals with MB, including the Festival of Hasidic Stories and Songs in Tel Aviv and the Hasidic Festival in Ranaana, as well as the International Klezmer Festival in Safed in August 1993, where I was invited to play and teach(.6)

As has been documented at least since the publication in 1971 of Andre Hajdu's article on the nigunim of Meron, there developed in Palestine and later in Israel a parallel instrumental tradition to the Eastern European and American traditions. Mount Meron, near Safed in the Northern Galilee, is the site of the annual pilgrimage on lag boymer (Lag ba-Omer), the main event where the Palestinian/Israeli Meron repertoire is performed.(7) What I found during these two research trips, was that klezmer music in Haredi life extends far beyond the boundaries of the annual pilgrimages to Meron, and that it involves relationships and sharings between klezmer music in Israel, Eastern Europe, and the United States, and between klezmer music and hasidic music in Israel, which are far more extensive and complex than was previously reported.

The musical landscape within the hasidic communities has also changed considerably since the time that Hajdu did his research over twenty-five years ago. Until the early 1960s, the hasidic wedding circuit had only one main performer, clarinetist Avrom Segal of Haifa (born ca. 1911 in Safed).(8) In those years the hasidic communities were not so large, and the real Yerushalmi (Jerusalemite) weddings had no klezmorim due to the ban on instrumental music at weddings within Jerusalem imposed by Rabbi Meir Auerbach and his tribunal during the 1860s. This was a further manifestation of an ongoing rabbinical debate since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.: As a sign of mourning, the playing of instrumental music was at first banned entirely. At least by the Middle Ages, instrumental music was allowed on certain occasions in most Jewish communities, particularly at weddings.(9) I found that there is now an entire second, third, and even fourth generation of musicians performing at Haredi weddings in Israel who display a tremendous interest in the music currently known as klezmer and include it in their repertoire in various ways.(10)

The view put forth by Hajdu that the music associated with the Meron pilgrimages forms a unified genre, a sister-repertoire to the American-Jewish dance bulgar, based on the information presently at hand, is an oversimplified model for the interaction of hasidic and klezmer music in Israel. This has not been brought out previously due to the general lack of contact between scholars researching klezmer traditions in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. As neither Hajdu nor Mazor, the two major scholars in this area, had done research among Eastern European or American klezmorim, perhaps they could not make the necessary connections, and at the time they were pursuing their initial research, American scholars were not yet researching klezmer music.(11) In addition, until now, none of the American or European researchers had to my knowledge pursued fieldwork in Israel, and so could not draw conclusions or make parallels in the opposite direction. Hajdu and Mazor had only begun to make field recordings in the late 1960s, so no comparison can be made to performances of Israeli-Palestinian repertoire prior to that time.