Album Notes

Original Tex from 1959 Album

Shlomo Carlebach, whose voice and original music are heard on this record, is a young ordained rabbi. He has started and remains in the center of an electrifying movement among the young people in the American Jewish communities.

His songs are an unusual expression of feelings reflecting varying as well as blended moods of Jewish religious life. The deep but yet beautifully simple joy of the Chassidic mystic moods in combination with the overwhelming love for the study of the Torah as lived in the world of the Yeshivot, permeate all of his music. Sparkling once in a while through this fusion of moods is a touch of Yemenite influence such as in the song “Esso Einai”.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach has been fortunate to drink from the cup of these many significant and beautiful environments.

He was born into a notable rabbinical family of Central Europe. His father, himself a rabbi of many distinguished qualities, hails from a long rabbinical line, dating back to the famous commentator of the Shulchan Aruch, Rabbi David Shmuel Halevi (The “Taz”). His mother’s ancestor was Rabbi Moshe Charif, the intimate friend of Rabbi Akiba Eger.

Shlomo too, from his early childhood, displayed extraordinary clarity and sharpness of mind. As a boy of eight he was already so familiar with the Talmudic treatises he had learned, that the great Lithuanian Rabbis, who often visited the home of his parents, all saw in him a potentially outstanding scholar of great future.

When his parents emigrated to Baden near Vienna, Austria, he used to attend Chassidic services. It is there that his heart was first captured by the Chassidic warmth. The melodies he heard then left an indelible impression on him. Upon his arrival to the United States, Shlomo studied at the Mesivta Torah Vodaath, and the Yeshiva of Lakewood, a foremost graduate school of Rabbinics. He received his Rabbinic degree in New York by one of the leading authorities, Rabbi Isaac Hutner.

He attended Columbia University and the new school of Social Research, and is now working towards his Doctorate in philosophy. While studying intensively in the Yeshivoth he experienced Chassidic life in the circle of the rabbis of Lubavitch, Bobow, and Modzitz in the sea of song and Chassidic studies.

For many years now Shlomo, as he has become known, has put Jewish youth at the center of his heart. With them he shares the joy of countless nigunim (melodies), - many of them his own – and the delight of words of Torah as well as a multitude of inspiring stories. From this enthusiastic and yet simple brotherhood of youth, has sprung the need for this record.

Today Shlomo can say with the psalmist, “Thy statutes have become my songs.”

The original melodies contained herein have been enhanced by the imaginative and colorfully orchestrated arrangements of Milton Okun. And engineering by Kalman Kinori.