“We’re waiting for Shlomo and then we see him coming down the block with 300 people. … We were singing and dancing until daylight,” Solomon told JNS.org.
Carlebach is best known for his Jewish music. “He’s universally accepted as the father of Jewish music,” said Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman of Mevo Modi’in.
Leslie Pomerantz and Michael Hoffman are both Jewish song leaders. Pomerantz told JNS.org that Carlebach made Jewish music “accessible” and taught song leaders the value of using music for engagement.
Hoffman described Carlebach’s music as “timeless” and noted how people have forgotten that many immensely popular melodies were in fact composed by Carlebach. For example, it was Carlebach who in 1965 invented “Am Yisrael Chai” for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry movement, which was later adopted for Jewish causes as a theme of resilience and perseverance. Other famed Carlebach compositions include “David Melech Yisrael,” “Od Yeshoma,” and “Esa Einai.”
Carlebach’s legacy is not without controversy. He faced allegations that became public in a 1998 Lilith magazine article, claiming he routinely made sexually suggestive late-night phone calls to female acquaintances and that he physically molested numerous women over the course of decades. Such accusations naturally provoked fierce controversy about how to remember a man many considered a saint.
“Can you imagine, in a period of a month, after one of his yahrzeits (anniversary of death), getting 50 phone calls about the same person from all over the world? He has victims in Israel, the U.S., Australia, South Africa—any place he went, he had victims,” said Vicki Polin of the Awareness Center, a non-profit with the mission of ending sexual violence in the Jewish community. “He did a lot of kiruv (outreach), but what about those who converted to other faiths—walked away completely—because of this assault?”
“Today’s youth won’t compromise for anything less than something that touches the depths of their own souls, which is really what [Carlebach] does through his teachings—so mind-blowing and deep, but in the same instance… he puts the sweet inside, so it goes down in a way that resonates,” author Shlomo Katz told JNS.org. Katz has devoted his professional life to collecting, transcribing, and teaching Carlebach’s Torah teachings, which can be found on tens of thousands of tapes and in hundreds of journals across the world.
This article was written by by Maayan Jaffe/JNS.org
P.S. from Jewish Press writer Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu:
I “discovered” Shlomo Carlebach around 1958, when he was just starting his career and when I was active in the orthodox NCSY youth group in Baltimore. I heard about his being a good “draw” and arranged for him to appear in our synagogue for a fundraiser, for which our group paid $500.
Back in 1958, when middle-class Jewish society was trying to achieve “social status” by imitating the “proper” non-Jewish elite. Carlebach blew that facade to pieces with his charisma and magnetic singing as he danced within the crowd in an electrifying frenzy.
He was authentic in an era when everything seemed like pretense and nothing was genuine except imitations.
Carlebach bowled us over and left everyone with no choice other than to join him into singing with him. He later appeared at NCSY conventions and mesmerized us with the 1920 spiritual folk song “Kum Ba Ya” (Come By Here), which became a standard campfire song in scouting and summer camps.
He raised us to a spiritual level, with everyone adding his own lyric – a wish, blessing or statement to the original, “Someone is singing my Lord, Kum Ba Ya.”
Regardless of whether he did or did not do anything wrong in his later life, his legacy was personal for me, as it remains for millions of others. He helped transform my life and was branded somewhere inside me even in the darkest moments when I drifted far, far away from Judaism.