Hello, how are you? I hope well. Today it is the black Friday, isn’t it? Well!!! I have a super offer for you: your subscription to Music Before Shabbat, now, half price! ? Guaranteed.

I am having a super demanding week and I must say I am exhausted but when I start to delve in the thrilling Jewish music and history my strengths are renovated.

This week many people have seen the “secret” Hassidic wedding with 7 thousand guests in New York. If you haven’t seen it yet, check this. I hope the time to celebrate with massive amounts of people together will come back soon…  In the meantime, I was thinking what are the usual insights of the population about the Hassidic Jews. Our protagonist of today, Israel Shorr, was from a Hassidic family so I will dedicate a part of this MBS to the Hassidism.

? And remember, there are previous editions of MBS about wonderful hazzanim from the Golden Age: Pierre Pinchik, Yossele Rosenblatt, Gershon Sirota and Moishe Oysher.

Do you remember the edition about John Zorn and the piece Sippur? Find it here. In that edition I already talked about the founder of Hassidism, Baal Shem Tov, who made many sippurim, many tales, to teach in an easy and appealing way the ethics and practices of this new line of Judaism. It you are not familiar with it, this video is very nice. Maybe I am a little childish? ? The fact is that it is very nice!

The happy way of approaching the religious celebration that you can see in this wedding in New York is explained in the way Hassidism understands life and the relationship with the divinity.

Listen to the rendition by Israel Schorr of this Shabbos prayer, Av Horachamim, written in memory of the communities that were wiped out during the Crusades. This brief explaination is from this work by Rabbi Y. Friedman on the web Chareidi and there you can find also a part of the poem: “In his tremendous mercy may [our] merciful Father […] recall in mercy the holy kehillos that gave up their lives in sanctification of [His] Name […]”. The kehillos are the congregations. For the full lyrics in English, check this web page.

There is more information about the use of the poem in Shabbat, on this site of the Ortodox Union.

I found a brief historical explanation about the destruction of the Jewish communities in Germany by the Crusaders in XI century and the use of this poem on this page of the St John’s Wood and The Saatchi Synagogues:

“Its origins lie in the wake of the First Crusade. Many Jewish communities in Germany were decimated as mobs found an outlet for their religious zeal in killing Jews before making their way to the Holy Land to wrest it from the Muslims. Thousands of men, women and children lost their lives in the communities of the Rhineland. Mainz, Worms, Speyer were ravaged over the course of a few weeks as the Crusaders made their way down Europe. […] As the black plague swept across Europe during the mid-fourteenth century, annihilating nearly half the population, Jews were taken as the scapegoat and were accused of having brought about the plague and were persecuted and killed.”