CONSIDERED OPINION

KALTMANN

Chana Raskin breaks new musical ground with an album of Hasidic melodies.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Chana Raskin was exposed to different genres of Jewish music from a young age. With family lineage traceable all the way back to the Alter Rebbe, the founder of the Chabad branch of Hasidism, the Raskins always had a particularly special relationship with wordless Jewish melodies known as niggunim. Most often made up of rhythmic sounds (“lai-lai-lai” or “bim-bam”, for instance) instead of lyrics and sung or hummed in groups, niggunim were composed by Hasidic leaders, often hundreds of years ago.

“My father loves niggunim and he would always sing them. We grew up with Chabad music,” Raskin said, adding that as one of eight children singing niggunum was a family affair. “We used to sing a lot at the Shabbat table, on motzei shabbat [when Shabbat ends on Saturday night] and we would always play these Chabad niggunim albums.”

These melodies, which provide an intense spiritual experience for all participants and aim to elevate the soul, are sung at Hasidic gatherings. They are sung by men and women alike, but separately. Orthodox men are prohibited from hearing women singing, for reasons of modesty – a prohibition known as kol isha. (There are more lenient opinions from some rabbis that exclude singing in mixed groups from the prohibition.)

While professional recordings of Hasidic niggnum in a male voice exist and many people will listen to them outside traditional gatherings, previously no full album of professionally recorded Hasidic niggunim in a woman’s voice had – even if there is a debate in Orthodox Jewish law about whether kol isha extends to recorded female voices.

That changed with the recent release of 35-year-old Raskin’s album Kapelya, which comprises more than a dozen Chabad Hasidic niggunim sung by Raskin, who uses the name RAZA when performing. The album features vocals from an additional circle of 21 women, including a small group of female instrumentalists that come from a wide range of Jewish backgrounds and are not exclusively from the Chabad movement. The only man to feature in any capacity on the album is Joey Weisenberg, a wellknown Jewish musician-composer that does not sing on the album, but appears as an instrumentalist on some of Raskin’s tracks. Weisenberg also produced and musically directed the entire project and album with Raskin. Other men were also involved in the making of the album, including male recording engineers and filmographers.

While many Orthodox women do not sing in public due to the prohibitions against men hearing their voices, Raskin does not mind performing for mixed audiences and created her album for anybody who wants to listen to it. “My hope is that women in the various communities I am connected to, including the broad-spectrum religious community, [such as] the Hasidic community, will get to listen to this music,” she said. “I hope that women will