On an autumn evening in north London, the exhilarating beauty of Jewish song lit up the night and warmed the hearts of a thousand enraptured listeners.
They had gathered for the fifth annual concert at St John’s Wood Synagogue for Bishnat, a charity promoting and celebrating the inspirational power of Jewish music.
Rabbi Daniel Walker of Heaton Park synagogue was a guest of honour, along with his congregation member Yoni Finlay, who was injured as he helped barricade the doors during the terror attack on Yom Kippur last year in which two Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were killed.
The two men were given a standing ovation at the October 13 event.
Rabbi Walker told the audience: “We live, we sing and we dance... and we never ever let darkness beat us.”
The star of the concert, titled Be The Light, was Hasidic singer Shulem Lemmer, the cantor tenor who made history as the first strictly Orthodox artist to sign a major recording deal in the US.
Performing in both Hebrew and English, his set featured October Rain, the original version of Eden Golan’s 2024 Eurovision song Hurricane, with the lyrics that were banned by the contest at the time for being too political for paying tribute to the victims of October 7.
Lemmer also sang One More Dance, a song he released earlier this year just before Simchat Torah – a prayer yearning that “we will dance again” after the massacre that took place on the day of the festival in 2023.
Other songs included Close Every Door from the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, plus classic numbers by Jewish artists, among them Simon and Garfunkel’s 1964 classic The Sound of Silence and Billy Joel’s 1974 hit Piano Man. Lemmer was joined by special guest South African Jewish singer Choni G (Choni Goldman), and as they sang Am Yisrael Chai before the interval, hundreds of audience members were roused to stand up and dance.
The singers spoke to the JC before the concert.
Lemmer shared his wish for the music to inspire positivity, saying: “We have to be connected to each other and we have to drown out the darkness with light. We need to bring back the light.”
Choni G also spoke of his determination that the community must not be defined by the enmity of others but instead be led by Jewish values.
He said: “We can’t just think we have to stand up to Jew hatred and persecution, we have to remember we have a mission as Jews – we have the deepest light to bring to the world and we have got to find it in ourselves.
“We need to ignore the hate. This concert, this music, it is almost like putting on noise-cancelling headphones, ignoring the noise and focusing on our mission of bringing light.”
The concert was organised by Bishnat founder Hilton Nathanson, who created the charity in memory of his father Brian Nathanson. Hilton described the evening as an evening of “pride, continuity and hope”.
He told the audience: “Bishnat changed after October 7 three years ago. What started as really a naive, innocent attempt to put on concerts for my father in his memory suddenly became something much bigger.”
Nathanson added: “The concert today is called Be The Light. It means so much. It means we will not be defined by those who hate us, we will be defined by love and who we are, our family, our faith, our heritage, our people and the state of Israel, which blows my mind every day.
“I stand here today as an unashamed Zionist. Through pogroms, exiles, and the Holocaust, one thing Jews have always done is sang.”
To find out more go to bishnat.org.
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