There’s always a story behind the songs that connect us to our own Pesach experience
HERSHY ROTTENBERG’s soulful, meditative “Kadeish Urchatz” helps create some of the magic as the night begins. Hershy wanted to carry himself back to the childhood Seder led by his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.
“My zeide had this little krechtz — yuh buh buh bum, oy vey — that he’d interject throughout the Seder. As he retold the Haggadah together with his own stories of miraculous survival in the concentration camps, he’d cry, and then repeat this little Vizhnitzer teniyele [musical phrase] that he’d brought along from his childhood home.”
One of the Belgian chassid’s first compositions, “Teniye’le,” made famous by Shulem Lemmer, tells of a chassid on the way home from his rebbe, wondering how he’ll get through the year after the uplifting Yom Tov as he holds the inspiration in a few short bars of the Rebbe’s teniyele. Hershy thought he would do something similar with his grandfather’s teniyele, framing it in an original prologue.
But once the introduction — “Pesach oif der nacht, ven er Tatte kumpt aheim fun shul…” — was written, a simple but moving melody followed, and instead of the old Vizhnitz piece, the simanim of the Seder came to mind: Kadesh, Urchatz, Karpas, Yachatz…
Create a free account to keep reading.
