My father loved nothing in this world more than a packed synagogue. Full, with people standing at the back, and the sound of melodic, harmonious singing reverberating off the walls. That was his happiest place.
Brian Nathanson was born in Leeds in 1938. He moved to Perth in the late 1940s, served for many years as president of the Perth Hebrew Congregation and sang in the Perth Male Jewish Choir for more than 30 years, something he loved and cherished until the end. He had enormous joie de vivre and a natural love of music.
He died in 2021. In his memory we established Bishnat, a registered charity built around a single, simple idea: to put Jewish music back into Jewish spaces, and to fill them.
What Bishnat does
Bishnat brings chazanim and Jewish singers from around the world to perform for communities across the UK and we hold our concerts in synagogues by design rather than convenience. At the centre of it is chazanut, an ancient tradition of prayer chanting, the musical form our liturgy was built to be sung in and an art form that has fallen out of fashion in much of the modern world. We are bringing it back into our communities, to be enjoyed, to uplift and to inspire.
The aim is not preservation for its own sake. Music does something argument cannot: we want people to leave with a renewed pride in their heritage. This October is our fourth year of concerts and our sixth overall, across London and Leeds. Our concert will take place on October 13, at a central London venue.
Three years on
The earlier concerts were a celebration. After October 7 there was a change. Now, three years on, there is a chance to reflect on what it feels like to be part of British Jewry in 2026.
Our world changed on October 7. For those of us who were in shul that Simchat Torah morning, the world we thought we lived in had gone by the time we came out. It has not come back.
What became clear in the days and months that followed was that there were two wars, not one. There was the military war Israel was fighting and is still fighting. And there was a second, aimed squarely at the diaspora and fought on social media, in the press, on campuses and in workplaces. It has been waged largely with words, but it has periodically turned violent, and on Yom Kippur in Manchester we saw where that leads.
There is a relentless, organised and targeted campaign to delegitimise and ultimately eradicate Israel. That campaign has extended to the diaspora, to British Jewry and to others, and beyond us to Western civilisation itself and to what liberal democracies have always claimed to stand for. We have all been forced to question our place, our friends and our own actions. But if we learn anything from our history, it is this: when Jews are threatened, anywhere, we do not keep silent.
What the evening is for
Four things. To remember those who fell. To honour those who fought. To recognise the heroes of the nations and of our own community here, the CST volunteers standing on the same street corner outside the same shul, week after week, in the rain, for three years; the people who organised the hostage vigils and kept turning up long after the crowds thinned; the ones who spoke up in rooms where it cost them something. Some of them will be in the hall, and on the screen.
And to reaffirm our pride in what it means to be Jewish.
Three years on, people are tired and many feel isolated. Singing together in one room is not a small thing. It is one of the oldest ways we have of putting a community back together.
What I hope for
What I hope for the evening is simple. That people come. And that they leave moved and uplifted, with something reawakened in them: a connection to their heritage, to Israel, to the values of this country and to what it is to be Jewish in Britain and to say so loud and proud.
When I was ten years old, my Jewish studies teacher held up a single twig in front of the class and snapped it in two. Then he bound a bundle of twigs and branches together and passed it round the room and asked each of us in turn to break it. Not one of us could. That, he said, is the Jewish community when it stands united.
I have thought about that bundle a great deal over the last three years. A full synagogue with hundreds of voices in it. Volunteers on a street corner in the rain. People who spoke up when it would have been easier to say nothing. Each one another branch bound into it. You will not break us. Not with words, not with lies, not with violence. Together we are unbreakable and in October you will hear exactly what that sounds like.
Tickets, sponsorship details and further information at bishnat.org
Registered charity 1197647