Still Playing Our Song

Five decades of children’s choirs, five decades of composition, and Chaim Banet is still in the studio. But his time, he’s joined by the “boys” he started out with — now grown men and grandfathers themselves, rabbanim, businessmen and askanim who’ve come to reminisce about those afternoons in a Haifa basement in Kiryat Vizhnitz where little voices were transformed into the soundtracks of our childhood

The songs are universal, whether you grew up in New York, L.A., London or Jerusalem — they’re classics that have been our Jewish music soundtrack for decades.

Were you at a pre-Tishrei assembly in elementary school the first time you heard “Machnisei Rachamim”? Davening Shacharis in cheder when you learned “Avinu Av Harachaman”? At a lively oneg Shabbos when your friends started singing “Hinei Anochi”? At a kumzitz when everyone closed their eyes as the leader began “Koh amar… zacharti lach chesed ne’urayich”?

Yet most people today, especially the younger generation of music consumers, have no idea that these enduring songs and hundreds more — titles such as “Meheira Hashem,” “Yehei Raava Kadamach,” “Shma Beni Shma Beni,” “Se’u Shearim,” “Yevanim Yevanim,” “Sa-a-meach Tesamach,” “Ner Leragli,” “Usefartem Lachem,” and so many, many others — all came from a little studio in Haifa, sung by a group of cheder kids organized by vintage composer Chaim Banet.

For the last 50-plus years, Banet has served as the official “court composer” of the Seret-Vizhnitz chassidus, creating new niggunim every year for the Yamim Noraim. Many of those niggunim made their way to the 70 (!) albums he’s released together with Moshe Mona Rosenblum — over a dozen of them under the Ranenu Chassidim choir label, the boys’ choir he put together in the early ’70s as director of the local Tzeirei Agudah choir.