Friday, February 17, 2023
A new album of soulful Hasidic nigunim performed by women
A remarkable new album of traditional Hasidic nigunim, wordless melodies, is giving listeners a taste of the soulful, unadorned way in which rebbes used to sing them in pre-war Eastern Europe.
What's even more unusual is that the singers are all women.
In fact, Kapelye (the Yiddish word for "band") may be the first full-length album of Hasidic nigunim performed by women. In it we hear 22 singers from various Jewish denominations perform traditional Chabad melodies that are publicly sung only by men, due to kol isha — the laws which prohibit men from hearing a woman singing. The 13 tracks on Kapelya blend Hasidic prayers with elements of Yiddish folk and klezmer music, hauntingly resonant of the musical traditions of Eastern European Jewry.
"From a musical point of view it's really significant that they kept it grounded and realistic, like people sitting around and singing, instead of trying to make it sound like art music," said Jordan Hirsch, a musician in the klezmer and Hasidic world who performs frequently for the Chabad community and knows some of the nigunim on the album. "It's clear that they put the nigun, and not the ego of the performers, at the forefront."
The lead singer is 35-year old Chana Raskin who was raised in the Chabad community of Crown Heights and now lives with her husband Dani and two children in Jerusalem. Raskin, who calls herself RAZA when performing, co-produced the album with master musician-singer Joey Weisenberg through his organization, the Rising Song Institute. "Joey was the one who first pushed me to record the nigunim," Raskin told the Forward.
Raskin has loved listening to and singing the sacred melodies of Chabad Hasidim since she was a little girl. Part of the reason has to do with her storied family history which includes a direct lineage to the Alter Rebbe, founder of the Chabad Hasidic movement. One of eight children, Raskin would often accompany her father to farbrengens — joyous gatherings combining words of Torah with the singing of nigunim — on shabbos afternoons.
On Simchat Torah she would sit perched on his shoulders, as he and the other men passionately sang and danced with the Torah scrolls. "It was so powerful, that feeling of connection to the rebbe," she said. She wasn't the only girl taking part in those festive gatherings. "I could see other little girls crawling tsvishn di fis," she said, using the Yiddish expression for "between the men's feet."
"Yiddish was my first language," Raskin said. Her mother was Israeli and spoke a broken English, especially at the beginning of their marriage, but her Yiddish was fluent so that was the most comfortable common language for her parents. "Their Yiddish flowed so naturally that for years I didn't even know it was Yiddish they were speaking!"
As a teenager Raskin often sang nigunim with other girls at her school, Beis Rivka, trying to recreate the heartfelt way that older generations of Hasidim would sing them. She had heard many recordings of nigunim heavily influenced by hip hop and other contemporary musical styles but this was not what she was looking for. Her model wasn't Matisyahu, but rather the Mitele Rebbe Dov Ber (1773-1827), who would invite a musical troupe of vocalists and musicians to perform and sing during special farbrengens, especially on Hanukkah and Lag B'Omer, and sometimes ask them to play and sing for him personally when he needed or wanted to be uplifted spiritually.
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