She made aliyah in 2011 and was living in Jerusalem working as a writer and translator when she suffered a brain injury in a fall in 2014. It was a shocking and life-changing experience, which, she explains directly led to the album.
“After struggling with treatment in Israel I went home to New York to be looked after by my parents, and eventually moved upstate for quiet.
"There were eight months living in the woods when I hardly spoke — I needed quiet due to my extreme sensitivity to sound and cognitive struggle with language —but I would start humming for pain relief, and it became a very creative period. I started hearing angelic voices singing with me, and became aware of the healing power of music.”
Chana Raskin (Ali Cherkis)
During this time she met her husband, Dani Bronstein, who is from a Modern Orthodox background, and they married in Israel. In 2018 she convened the first Raza workshops in Jerusalem, teaching nigunim to groups of women.
The invitation to make it into an album came from her friend Joey Weisenberg, who lives in Philadelphia. He invited her to fly over and record her longed-for album after the birth of her second son.
“We recorded it on August 2022, ten months to the day after my son was born. I was still nursing him, so it wasn’t easy, but my husband and mother looked after him in New York while I was gone.”
Weisenberg, who she’d met at a co-educational yeshiva, is the only man involved with the project. “I really needed him to realise the vision I had of singing these songs with other women,” she says.
The other women in the one-off choir are friends of hers and of Weisenberg, and other women who love to sing: “They travelled from all over — Baltimore and Washington DC, as well as New York — to record this album.”
She found it hard leaving her children and husband behind, but was determined to make it work.
“I was the director and had to teach all of these women the nigunim, both the words and the sometimes quite complex and challenging melodies.”
She was determined to bring the beauty of the songs to a wider audience . “I felt they had to be put out into the world, even if no one listened to them."
The women mostly sing a cappella, underpinned in some places by a cello, a flute and a clarinet played by Weisenberg, who does not sing on the tracks.
A single from the album, the heart-soaring Yemin Hashem, has just been released digitally and CDs of the full album are being pressed for purchase.
Did she experience a backlash from the Chasidic community when she started fundraising for the album? She’s happy that it did not materialise. In fact, she has encouragement and donations from strictly Orthodox rabbis. And her family have remained supportive, even though she is less religious than they are.
As to whether the men in her family have heard the album: “I don’t know whether all of my brothers have listened to the tracks,” she says, “ and I haven’t asked.”
‘Kapelya’ is released by Rising Song Records; razamusic.bandcamp.com/track/yemin-hashem
