Akeidah Moments  

If you’d see me today, a standard-looking 30-something avreich with a big black yarmulke and a guitar, singing my compositions together with my dear friends Eitan and Shlomo Katz and others, you’d probably never guess the turns my life has taken.

While you might be familiar with my music, if you listen carefully to a single I released a few years back, called “Akeidah” — produced and arranged by Eitan Katz — it might give a hint. The words are from the Torah section of Akeidas Yitzchak, but to me they carried a very personal message as well. In fact, I wrote this song as a dedication to my mother, Halina (Chaya Ita) Wasilewicz a”h, who to me represented so much of what the Akeidah meant for Klal Yisrael — a parent endlessly and unconditionally sacrificing for her child.

You see, I was born in Czestochowa, Poland, in 1988, the only child of a single Jewish mother. Since there were no Jewish schools in Poland at that time, I was sent to a local public school. When I was about six years old, I came home from school and I told my mother what the teacher told us that day:

“Mommy, tomorrow we can’t eat meat. We are going to church, and the priest is going to pour ashes over our heads.”