In Record Time

As a young high school student, I had no idea what the inside of a music studio looked like. One day, exactly 50 years ago, my older brother, Yosef Chaim, came home and presented us with an album — the very first JEP record, which he told us he’d actually created. “What does that mean? Did you sing on it?” I asked him innocently. After he gave me his trademark older-brother glare, I took the record with me into my room and played it on my record player. Half a century later, I’m happy to pass the pen to my brother Rabbi Golding, today CEO of Hatzoloh of Rockland County, for the real JEP backstory.

After we’d run a lively JEP (Jewish Education Program) shabbaton on Long Island in early 1973, Rabbi Mutty Katz approached me with an idea: As one of the children had a great voice, and as more of our songs used original English lyrics that public school kids understood, maybe we make a record?

And, if the record took off, the proceeds would go to establish a JEP scholarship fund to help subsidize tuition payments for public school children who agreed to make the switch to yeshivos.

At that stage of my life, I had zero experience with Jewish music, other than Color War grand sings in Camp Kol-Ree-Nah. Nevertheless, I approached my talented chavrusa, Moshe Hauben, a longtimer at Camp Agudah, and the two of us decided to jump in. We asked some of our Camp Torah Vodaath friends to join us in a strategy meeting to see if we could assemble ten Color War songs with Torah values. Joining us was Chaim Schmell, who had written “Six Million Tears” for a music night in Camp Torah Vodaath a couple of years earlier. He’d be a great choir leader… but we didn’t yet have a choir.

We then approached Isaac Gross and Yisroel Lamm of Neginah Orchestra fame, who loved our idea and worked with us on a shoestring budget of slightly over $5,000. But we didn’t have that kind of money either.