The Extraordinary Music of Yaakov Shwekey

The Diamonds

The story begins in a world before the darkness fell, with a young couple, Yaakov Shwekey’s maternal grandparents, newly married and full of promise. Her name was Esther Adler, born Esther Smayovich. They had barely begun their life together when the war tore them apart. Yet every day, through years of hunger and brutality, her husband would ask for her. “Have you seen my Esther?” He searched for her in the faces of skeletons, whispering her name when there was no one left to listen.
“They had just gotten married when the Nazis came,” Yaakov explains. “He was a well-to-do person with a beautiful home. They ravaged it and took everything.”
Esther survived with the help of diamonds she hid in her teeth. In those first days at Auschwitz, when women were shoved from the freight cars, stripped of their belongings, their names replaced with numbers, she gripped the stones as though, in holding them, she could still hold on to herself, to her humanity. She remained brave, dignified, unselfish, comforting others, using her diamonds to obtain a crust of bread not only for herself but for those around her. Quietly, never seeking recognition, she helped them survive one more day, and another day, and another.
“It was all in her neshamah,” Yaakov says. “That’s just who she was. She used those diamonds to save a lot of people throughout her journey. She traded jewelry for food. Meanwhile, my grandfather never gave up on finding her. Every day he would ask where his Esther was.” And then one day, he stopped asking.
“Even when the train was already moving, something in him knew she was there.”
His grandparents were reunited, and they wanted to breathe easily again, to cherish their safety and the sheer miracle of finding one another alive.
There are many ways to survive, but there is only one way to remember that life is sacred, even when the world denies that truth. Shabbos was the seed of eternity planted within them. Even in the place where every human dignity was stripped away, when everything else was taken, Shabbos remained.
They gathered whatever fragments they could assemble—a bit of bread, a cup for wine—and they sang. Something opened in that moment. To sing on Shabbos was to touch the Eternal, and be touched by it.
In the DP camps they began again. “I think they were there for five years,” Yaakov relates. “They had three girls in the DP camps. My mother was the first.”
His grandfather had survived the war alive, but something inside him had not survived intact. His family had been obliterated, and the suffering was immense. The darkness ate at him, tormented him, left him brittle and sad. The memories settled into the home like uninvited guests, taking up residence, reciting the same torn script of loss and terror, again and again.
He carried deep pain, and he longed to step away from everything that reminded him of it, but she wanted something different. She wanted to take every last penny and invest it in Yiddishkeit, in passing on what they had nearly lost.
“When she was a little girl, my mother would sit at the top of the steps,” Yaakov recounts. “She heard her mother telling her father, ‘What did we survive for? What do we have the money for? We have to continue to be proud of who we are. Yes, we’re broken, but we must become whole again from the broken places. We must continue to believe in Hashem, live with faith and keep Shabbos. And what do they have to offer that’s so much better than ours?”
One day, it became too much for him; he left. He divorced Esther and walked out on the three girls. “He became a very well-to-do businessman,” Yaakov says. “He owned hotel rooms around the world, wherever he went. I remember meeting him in one of those rooms.” Yaakov’s grandmother and her three girls had to fend for themselves in Cleveland.

From Cairo to Brooklyn

On the other side of the world, in a sun-drenched city that would soon turn hostile, a different kind of separation was unfolding.
Menachem grew up in Cairo. The Shwekey family had a great life there, Yaakov says. His father told him they had an unbelievably wonderful childhood until the last year or two, when everything started to change. “That’s when they started to see a lot of dissent and a lot of anti-Semitism.”
After 1948, when Israel became a state, Egyptian Jews found themselves caught in the middle. Properties were confiscated, hundreds were arrested, and Jews started to feel that they weren’t wanted there anymore.
“I got more of the history when I first met Chacham Ovadia Yosef,” Yaakov recalls. “He pinched me on the cheek and said, ‘I owe your family a lot of gratitude, because your great-uncle gave me my first job in Cairo.’ Since then, I developed a tremendous relationship with Chacham Yosef and his family. I went to sing there all the time. Every time I came to sing in Israel, I would visit him and sing with him, in the sukkah and on many of the Yomim Tovim.”

The rabbanim in Cairo understood what was coming. They sent word to Rav Kalmanowitz of the Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn that their students were in danger. Between 1956 and 1957, Rav Kalmanowitz worked to bring Sephardic boys from Egypt, Syria and Morocco to study at the Mirrer Yeshiva. It was a rescue operation built on the understanding that there was no Jewish future left for these boys at home.
Menachem’s mother, Adele, knew what had to be done. When Rav Kalmanowitz arrived and told her, “Your son should leave Egypt; he has no future here,” she knew he was right. She hugged Menachem tightly…and then she let him go. It was a tearful goodbye, because they both knew they might not see each other ever again. “My grandmother used to cry every time she would tell me about it.”
He was 14 years old when he boarded the ship with about 40 other boys. They crossed an ocean and arrived in Brooklyn, a city that felt nothing like home.
“He went on the boat with the Chehebar family and a lot of the other names that you see on the Mirrer Yeshiva building now,” Yaakov says. “Many people who are big baalei tzedakah today in America were with him on that boat.”
But then Menachem was just another frightened boy heading toward an uncertain future. Rav Kalmanowitz and the yeshivah gave Menachem and the other boys work and simple places to sleep. “They really didn’t have anything,” Yaakov says. “He would stay up until two or three in the morning organizing sefarim in the beis midrash for two dollars just to have a little cash of his own.”
The rosh yeshivah, Rav Shmuel Berenbaum, and his family saw that Menachem and the other refugee boys needed help, and they did whatever they could for them. But Menachem was still only 14 years old and far from home.
It was two more years before Adele could follow him to America. “Later on, when he was sick with Parkinson’s for the last 20 years of his life, my grandmother would say, ‘Everybody talks about the sacrifice of the mother in Cleveland, but what about him?’” Yaakov says. “What about a 14-year-old boy sent alone across an ocean, not knowing much Torah, not knowing how to be frum, not knowing anything except that his mother believed he needed to survive?
“He was brilliant with numbers,” Yaakov notes. “Later, after his siblings arrived in America, he completed the requirements to become a CPA in only 18 months because he wanted his brothers to stay in yeshivah.” Those brothers later became rabbis, one in Deal, New Jersey, and one in Mexico City, influencing thousands of people. He carried the weight of responsibility for their Torah future.
Even though he became a working man, something had been lit within him at the Mir. “Sefardim are like bees to honey for spiritual growth. They have a fire in the neshamah that just has to be lit. The fuse is there, the gasoline is there; it just needs to be lit,” Yaakov reflects. “For the rest of my father’s life, Torah and Shabbos and singing would be central to his character. He would carry the Sephardic zemiros of Cairo to Brooklyn, where they would meet the Ashkenazi melodies of Cleveland, and together they would create something beautiful.”
Yaakov’s mother eventually went to Brooklyn to find work to help support her mother an her sisters. Every paycheck she earned went back to Cleveland. Someone from the Berenbaum family heard about this girl who sent her earnings home. He knew Menachem, too, and he introduced them.
Two people who had been shaped by loss, an Ashkenazi daughter of Holocaust survivors and a Sefardi boy from Cairo, set out to build something from what remained. What neither of them could have known then was that their efforts would create a home where all of klal Yisrael could sit at one table.
They married and built a family together, four boys and four girls, now spread from Lakewood to Miami and beyond, yet bound by one shared memory: the Shabbos table.
The Shabbos table was the place where those two worlds met most beautifully. Syrian melodies met Vizhnitz niggunim. Gefilte fish sat beside kibbe. The zemiros of Cairo and Cleveland wove together into something that belonged to everyone.
In Yaakov’s childhood home, Shabbos became the axis of the week. Born in Jerusalem and raised for a time in Mexico City, he ultimately grew up in Brooklyn.
When I speak with Yaakov about his Shabbos memories, he leans forward slightly, and his voice warms when he speaks about his father. “Shabbos was the climax of the week in our home,” Yaakov says.
At their Shabbos table, his father sang Eishes Chayil as if it were a living conversation. “It was a whole production,” Yaakov says, smiling at the memory. “He didn’t just say the words quickly. He dwelled on them. When he reached V’lechem atzlus lo sochel, ‘she does not eat the bread of laziness,’ he would trace a small, affectionate no with his finger, a wordless tribute to his wife’s diligence. He pointed to my mother and made motions with his hands. At Tnu lah mipri yadeha, he would turn toward her again, hands open, as if he were giving her back her fruits. He made her into the queen of the house.”
He brought the song to life at the table and the life at the table into the song, until they could no longer be separated. The family treasured the sense of peace that Shabbos brought.
Yaakov’s voice softens as he describes this. It’s clear these Friday nights weren’t just memories; they were the foundation of everything he would become.
Listening to him, I find myself thinking of my own Shabbos table and pondering how Shabbos creates a shared language across generations, across continents, across the vastness of Jewish experience.
That language is often absorbed at home. “My father wanted the children to experience Shabbos,” Yaakov continues. “He also wanted us to see how much he respected our mother. That taught us what a marriage should look like. The respect and honor a husband gives his wife stays with the children forever, even when it’s expressed in the simplest, most lighthearted ways.”
This is how Yaakov’s parents created a sanctuary where time slowed and questions mattered as much as answers. At their Shabbos table you could hear Diaspora Yeshiva Band, chasidic niggunim, Joe Amar, old Sephardic songs, anything that touched the neshamah. It didn’t matter where it came from; if it carried heart and holiness, it was welcome.
At that table, zemiros were a form of tefillah. They were how the family spoke to Hashem through song. The love of Shabbos and Hashem shared was woven into the melodies they sang and the life they lived together.
Years later, before his parents passed away, Yaakov sat at his own Shabbos table with his friend David Hillel, singing an old melody. “What happened to this song?” they wondered. “We barely hear it anymore.”
Yaakov tried singing it for his son Menachem. The boy looked up at him, puzzled. “What’s that one, Abba?” He didn’t know it.
Song after song, Yaakov tested other melodies. Yedid Nefesh. Classics from Avraham Fried and Mordechai Ben David. Carlebach niggunim. Songs he had assumed “everyone” knew. His son and his friends didn’t recognize many of them.
He had thought these songs would pass naturally to the next generation, that they would live in his children’s heads the way they lived in his. But they didn’t.
I watch his face as he describes this moment. For someone whose life is music, the realization must have felt seismic. It would, eventually, become the catalyst for something larger. But that decision would come later, born from grief and urgency.
David Hillel once told him about an interview with a secular Israeli singer. When asked if anyone would remember his music in 20 years, the singer was honest: probably not, he admitted. “But the songs they sing here in this beit knesset on Shabbat kodesh?” he said. “Those will last forever.”
“The spark went in,” Yaakov says. “I said, you know what? If Hashem gave me the shlichus to be in music, and I don’t bring out the tradition of what Jewish music is all about, then what am I doing?”
How many of us have experienced this? A melody our grandparents sang slips away because we never learned the tune. A niggun that sustained our parents and grandparents through exile, through the generations of the past, fades because no one ignites the spark. And with each song that disappears, something of our collective memory dims.
When I was a child, one story I heard lingered with me long after I grew up. I don’t remember who told it first, only that it settled somewhere deep and stayed there.
The story goes like this: A chasid is shipwrecked on a mysterious island. When he washes ashore, he finds the streets empty, houses with doors ajar, tables set but untouched, streets without footsteps. He wanders alone through the silence, living on berries, wild figs and water from the stream, sleeping in abandoned houses. Days pass. The world around him remains desolate and forsaken, save for the crickets pouring out their ceaseless song.
Then, late on a Friday afternoon, as if from nowhere, the streets suddenly fill with people. Hundreds of them, dressed in ancient robes, carrying food, hurrying to the bathhouse, preparing for Shabbos. Moments earlier the streets were silent and empty; now they thrum with life, urgency and purpose. He tries to speak to them, but everyone answers the same way.
“No time. Shabbos is coming.”
The sun slips toward the horizon, shadows stretch long across the fields and Shabbos descends. It emanates from every corner, wrapping the town in purity and peace. It is more beautiful than anything he has ever known: the tefillos, the singing, the meals that seem to stretch beyond time itself, otherworldly, mei’ein Olam Haba.
After Havdalah, the people vanish. He is alone again.
This happens week after week: desolation, then life, then desolation again.
Finally, he manages to stop the rabbi before he disappears. “Tell me what is happening.”
“The people you see here,” the rabbi tells him, “have all passed on to the next world. We were a community that lived in Yerushalayim. When the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed, our hearts broke so completely that we could not go on.”
In heaven, they were given a choice to remain there forever or to spend six days above and one Shabbos here on earth. They chose Shabbos.
Now that the chasid knows their secret, the rabbi told him, he too must choose: six days in heaven and one day on earth, or a return to the world of the living.
Only years later did I understand why this story followed me for so long.
Because this is how the week often feels.
Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question: What is the meaning and purpose of life? But the answer often eludes us, hiding behind a blur of racing hours as we struggle to fit our means to our dreams, our desires to reality, our convictions to the lives we actually lead. Eternity is here, but we are seldom still long enough to taste it.
Six days of wrestling with the world, swept along by the relentless surge of time and its constant pull in every direction. World events beyond our control. Personal events that, despite every effort to keep our hands on the wheel, more often than not end up controlling us.
And then Shabbos comes.
The neshamah, living in the background of our lives, alone, neglected, half-forgotten, feels restored. The people are the same, the demands still waiting, the unfinished parts of the week still there. But the island is no longer empty. The soul is no longer desolate.
Shabbos is the most precious gift drawn from the treasure house of Hashem, a delight to the soul and a delight to the body. It arrives not as an escape from the world but as the place where the soul finally feels at home within it.
“That’s what Shabbos does,” Yaakov says. “It brings everyone home.” For him, this understanding became urgent.
One question kept him working late into the night, the same question that sent him to Spain a day after sitting shivah for his mother: What does it take, in this generation, to ensure that the eternal songs of Shabbos live inside a child’s heart so they carry him into adulthood, shape the atmosphere of the home he will one day build, and transmit its sanctity to the generations that follow?
At his childhood table, the songs were absorbed and carried forward without effort. They lived in the air, as natural as breath.
But when his own son didn’t recognize a zemer that had once been the heartbeat of Yaakov’s Shabbos table, he realized that legacy is not guaranteed; it must be built with intention.
Because Yaakov Shwekey’s voice doesn’t merely sing; it remembers.
Long before concert halls and massive crowds, before stages and spotlights, before the strange experience of being recognized wherever he went, the music that would one day define his life had already traveled a long road.
It passed through Europe and the Middle East, through war and migration, through separations and reunions. The songs that warmed Yaakov’s childhood table were carried by the loss, endurance and faith of grandparents who sang through displacement and rebuilding, longing for the peace and wholeness of a Jewish home.
“Our Shabbos table wasn’t a place where you ate quickly and moved to the couch,” Yaakov says. “It went on for hours, four hours easily, and we didn’t even feel the time passing because we loved it so much.”
“My father said a short dvar Torah, five or six minutes at most, always with sincerity and kavod,” he recalls. “But what stayed with me was not the content of the speeches. I don’t remember the exact words. I remember the smile. I remember the joy.”
During the Shabbos meal, his mother would sit and listen, taking in the singing she had worked so hard to make possible. Once the cooking and serving were done, her face softened. “My sisters did plays and the great harmonies, and she enjoyed it so much,” Yaakov remembers. “Her face reflected serenity. Shabbos came and she worked hard, but I’ll never forget the celebration aspect of it.”
Their home carried two different kinds of strength, each shaping the other. “Whenever my father had a little bit of din with us, we would right away run to my mother for rachamim,” Yaakov says. “My mother was a very, very soft type. She had such a compassionate heart, such a compassionate eye. My father was a little tougher around the edges, but he always gave her tremendous honor. And if she said something, in the end, even though it was overriding what he was trying to do, he respected that.”
Then, without warning, loss entered their world.
When Yaakov was nine, his aunt Judy came to say goodbye before leaving for Camp Sternberg. She was 20 years old, full of heart and neshamah. She was the aunt who dropped down to the kids’ level and made them feel like the center of her world. Before she left for the summer, she sat with Yaakov and his siblings on the living room floor, played with them, laughed with them, promised to send letters, and then she left.
A few days later, the news came. There had been a bus accident. Judy had given up her seat to someone else. She didn’t make it home.
“I’ll never forget seeing my father cry,” Yaakov says quietly. “I had never seen him like that before.” For a nine-year-old boy, the safety he had assumed in the world fell away. He did not yet have a word for grief, only the sudden realization that the people he loved were terrifyingly fragile. That night, he dreamed about her. He could not come to grips with why she wasn’t coming back.
A month later, his grandfather was niftar, and the family’s heart, already raw with sorrow, split open again. Two losses in 30 days.
“My grandmother carried tremendous pain,” Yaakov says. “Every time she saw a picture of her daughter, she would turn white. But she fought and persevered.”
He watched his father live through it. He watched his grandmother live through it. “And they still found a way to sing,” Yaakov says. “They found a way to have a family, to celebrate, to bring joy back.”
These losses taught him early on that life is not only about singing when everything is aligned, when the sound is right and the band is in sync. It’s about what you do when the song falters, when it veers off from the path you imagined it would follow.
“That’s why Dovid Hamelech means so much to us,” Yaakov says. “Because he found a way to sing through every challenge.”
His voice lifts slightly on these last words. The lesson has stayed with him.
The Shabbos table became even more precious after that. When everything else seemed to fall apart, it became a steady island, a place where grief and gratitude could sit side by side, where loss could be held within something larger than itself.
In conversation with Yaakov now, the warmth of those Friday nights still lives in his words. The values he absorbed at that table followed him into adulthood, living on in the choices he made, the home he built and the sense of mission that guides him. He sees his voice as a gift on loan and as a responsibility.
When I ask Yaakov about Chanukah, his expression brightens. “Chanukah is one of my favorite times,” he says. “Growing up, and now with my own children too.”
Of course, his kids look forward to the gifts, but that was never the heart of it. “It wasn’t only about that,” he says. “It was about the family getting together, the singing, the way the kids would wait for it.”
Today, they often sing Chasof, a song from his first album, and it brings him back to those early years, when music once again became the bridge between generations.
“Chanukah comes in the middle of the winter for a reason,” Yaakov says. “It tells you, ‘Stop. Remember that you are fire. Remember that you bring your light into the world.’”
Now, with anti-Semitism so present, that message feels sharper. “You celebrate that light,” he says. “You’re proud. You try to be a light to the nations. You try to make a kiddush Hashem, even when it’s not easy.”
For him, Chanukah is a time of closeness. Sitting with his children, playing games, talking, laughing. “There’s so much joy then,” he says. “But you’re also teaching your children who they are and where they come from.”
On the menorah, the shamash is the flame we use to light the others. It’s not displayed for itself but for what it gives. The inner fire his parents kindled in him became that shamash, a light meant to be passed on. What began at one family table slowly reached outward, touching lives far beyond it.
When Yaakov first considered pursuing music seriously, his rebbe gave him one clear condition: Don’t record an album until you are married. So when he began dating Jenine, he didn’t mention singing at all. Only after their engagement did he casually suggest having a band. At their wedding, he performed a song that would later appear on his first album. By the end of the evening, Jenine had to admit that maybe her chasan could sing a little more than he had let on.
What Yaakov did not yet fully realize was that he was marrying someone whose neshamah was oriented toward chesed in ways he was only beginning to understand.
When Jenine was 16, she and her friend Chaya Rachel Bender slept over at a home with a child who had special needs. Simply bathing the child took two or three hours. The exhaustion was overwhelming. The family was breaking under the weight of this child’s care. The two girls looked at each other and thought: How many other families are going through this alone?
They rented an apartment with their own money and began taking in a few children. Word spread. Families started calling and then lining up for help. What began as an act of teenage compassion grew into the Special Children’s Center, an organization that today serves more than 1,000 families in Lakewood, the Five Towns, Brooklyn and beyond.
Watching Jenine pour herself into families in crisis taught Yaakov something crucial. Chesed is not an idea. It’s showing up when it’s hard and staying when you are exhausted. This is what his grandmother lived by, keeping Shabbos even when she was alone. This is what his father lived by, singing zemiros even through grief.
Early in his career, a year before his first album was released, someone in the music business told Yaakov that with a Sephardic name like Shwekey, he shouldn’t bother putting out an album. Ashkenazim wouldn’t relate to it.
“I was taken aback,” Yaakov says. “Not because I felt discouraged; I was always confident. But I remember thinking, who is this person to decide my future? Who is he to say what will or won’t be received?”
Even composers, he says, don’t know how their songs will be received. “You just have to put it out there. I said to myself, I’m going to be as authentic and as raw as I can be, because that’s who I am. I’m going to do it the way I know how, the way I believe in. And if people don’t take to it, that means Hashem is telling me that it’s not for me. And that’s okay.”
He went home and told his parents what had been said. “They said, ‘What do you mean? What name are you going to put? Goldberg? Shwekey, that’s your name.’” His mother was unwavering. Be who you are.
The way he tells this story with gratitude makes it clear this advice became his north star. It’s advice that he gives his own children now.
“You’ve got to sing your own song,” he tells them. “Don’t sing anybody else’s song.”
It was the same lesson the Shabbos table had been teaching him all along. You don’t hide who you are. You don’t trade your family’s songs for something more “mainstream.” Zemiros draw their power from their truth. You sing them with all their texture and history intact.
The Shabbos table doesn’t ask you to become someone else; it asks you to become fully yourself. The Shwekey home had an open-door policy in the simplest, truest sense. Guests flowed in constantly. Neighbors, strangers, anyone who needed a place for Shabbos. “We had a lot of guests all the time,” Yaakov says.
It was not hospitality as a concept; it was hospitality as an atmosphere.
“My parents didn’t preach,” he says. “They didn’t sit us down and explain what Shabbos or zemiros were supposed to do for us. They just sang. They understood something simple: music brings happiness into a home. The wine makes you happy. The songs make you happy. You don’t have to teach that. You live it. Once you start preaching, kids tune out. But when you’re just singing together, they take it into their hearts.”
Every type of music was welcome. Anything that touched the neshamah had a place at the table. And people followed the sound.
“Our sukkah was constantly full,” Yaakov laughs. “The neighbors came from around the whole neighborhood.”
Even today, people stop him to reminisce about it. Just recently, a neighbor pulled him aside and said, “Do you remember those sukkahs? Your sukkah was an entire city. Everyone came to sing.”
As his career grew, Yaakov asked his rav about music, about travel and about being away on Shabbos.
“In the first years when your children are young,” his rav told him, “Don’t go away for Shabbos. Maybe one exception. Come to me if you have an exception. Jobs will come and go, but the years when your children are growing, you will never get back.”
Yaakov took it to heart. You can’t transmit Shabbos from a distance. You can’t teach zemiros over the phone. The songs his father had given him, the gestures during Eishes Chayil, the harmonies that lasted until midnight, the way time stopped at that table, were not things you could schedule or recover later. They happened in real time, week after week, or they didn’t happen at all.
Wherever he went, from concert halls to city streets, the voices of home went with him.
It was 2006, and Yaakov was scheduled to perform in Paris on Motzaei Shabbos. He and his wife flew in early to spend Shabbos together in the city. Before the trip, he had a long conversation with his mother.
“Paris?” she exclaimed. “It’s dangerous there.”
She wanted him to promise he would wear a baseball cap to cover his yarmulke.
“Ma, I don’t do that,” he told her. “I can’t do that. I wear my yarmulke proudly. I just do my thing.”
They spoke for over an hour. Anti-Semitism in Europe was rising. She was afraid for him. “I told her I can’t promise to hide,” he says. “But I promised her I wouldn’t go into dangerous neighborhoods, that I’d stay with people, that I’d be careful. And this time I was traveling with my wife.”
His eyes light up with the memory.
“I’ll never forget walking with her on the Champs-Élysées,” he says. “I’m wearing my yarmulke, I’m getting stares, and I’m thinking back to my conversation with my mother. Maybe she had a point. Maybe I should have listened.”
Then he looked ahead and saw them coming. A large group of motorcycle riders, bandanas pulled tight over their faces, racing straight toward them.
“At that moment,” he says with a half-smile, “all I was thinking was whether my wife could book us hospital beds.”
The lead rider stopped in front of him and suddenly lifted an Israeli flag. One by one they pulled off their bandanas. They were Jewish kids. There were 40 or 50 of them. And right there, in the middle of Paris, they began dancing and singing to his songs. Pedestrians stopped. A crowd gathered. Jews were dancing openly in a city where they had been told to hide.
“Afterward I called my mother,” Yaakov says. “I told her, ‘Ma, can you imagine if I had worn a different hat and they didn’t recognize me? This would never have happened.’”
“I understand,” she answered. “But thank G-d you came back safe.”
He smiles at the memory, but there’s something deeper there, a recognition that visibility, even when it feels dangerous, is part of his mission.
“In truth,” he says, “I’ve experienced far more people coming back than anti-Semitism.” In São Paulo, he has sung for halls where half the audience was evangelical Christians. Just last week, a rabbi in Orlando told him that converts he works with are finding their way to Yiddishkeit through the music. “I couldn’t believe it,” Yaakov says.
There are, of course, moments when fear breaks the spell. In Europe especially, security now shadows him closely. There have been bomb threats. Once in Paris a venue had to be evacuated while dogs were brought in to sweep for explosives. “But baruch Hashem, with siyata dishmaya, I’m protected,” he says. “Overall, I’ve seen so many people wanting to come back, people wanting to be part of it, because they realize the music isn’t just entertainment. It gives joy. It gives connection.”
He thinks of Doron, who passed away too young. Yaakov first met him at a concert in Caesarea. Each time Yaakov returned to perform, Doron took on another mitzvah.
“After the first concert, he began wearing tzitzis,” Yaakov says. “By the next, he had taken on tefillin.”
Doron once told him, “The singing gave me such an infusion of ruchniyus that I just wanted to take on more mitzvos.”
Not long ago in Paris, at a kiruv concert, tablets were placed on each seat so listeners could choose a mitzvah to accept upon themselves after each song. “In one night,” Yaakov says, still astonished, “over 800 mitzvos were taken on. Eight hundred.” He shakes his head. “If you don’t call that the power of music, the power of changing neshamos, then I don’t know what is.”
He saw the depth of that truth most starkly in Mexico, at an event where Eli Sharabi was speaking. Eli, a survivor of the October 7 massacre who lost his entire family, spoke about Shabbos in captivity. About the small pieces of pita the terrorists gave them, and how he divided them carefully so that each person would have a share. About the brachos whispered in the tunnels. About how, even there, they tried to honor Shabbos kodesh.
“I was crying like a baby,” Yaakov says. His son, who had come with him, looked at him in surprise.
“It’s amazing,” Yaakov says now. “No matter the story, we should never look at any Jew who is not keeping Shabbos and think they don’t want it. The thirst is always there. It’s just a matter of bringing a person to a place where they can discover it.”
That night, Yaakov sang for Eli. He gave him his tallis, inscribed with the names of the fallen. Two men who had never met before were joined in one moment of song, loss and faith.
Eli is keeping Shabbos now and teaching others. He travels the world speaking about what he endured, about Shabbos kodesh, about mitzvos.
Yaakov’s voice catches slightly as he tells me this. These aren’t just concert stories to him; they’re evidence that the music does what he hopes it will do.
“When our backs are to the wall, a Yid knows what matters,” Yaakov says.
Yaakov speaks often about the stories that trail behind his songs. “Every song you hear,” he says, “has a story behind it. You don’t always know who it touched or how it changed a life until years later.” Sometimes it’s his wife who reminds him of moments he himself has forgotten. A wedding that grew out of a melody. A return that began with a tune online.
“Music reaches places nothing else can,” he says. “Someone can be alone in India or Hawaii and hear a song online, and suddenly something inside them wakes up. They want to do something for am Yisrael. They change their lives. You never know where a song will land.”
He sees this not as a career but as a responsibility. Each person, he believes, is called to respond with the gifts they were given. His gift happens to be song.
He thinks back to what his parents built. To Yaakov, the Shabbos table they created was not just about the food or even the songs. It was about what those songs carried: joy, pride and openness. It was about making space for wonder, for everyone to contribute, for everyone to feel they belonged.
After both his parents were niftar within one year, what had once been an idea became an obligation. The urgency he had felt on that stage in Spain followed him home. It followed him into the quiet of the studio, into late-night phone calls, into months of planning, hesitation and resolve.
The moment the question became unavoidable came the day after he got up from shivah for his mother. He was scheduled to fly to Spain to sing for more than a thousand students at an Olami event, young Jews from around the world who were not religious and were searching for something real. He wanted to cancel. How could he step onto a stage and sing so soon after his mother’s petirah?
Then a friend reminded him that the students were already waiting. “I told him it was hard to leave so soon,” Yaakov says. “But then I said, you know what? I can do it. I’m not canceling on these students. My mother would never want me to cancel.”
Boarding that plane, he realized how raw he truly was. “It was probably the most brutal thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “I always thought I was tough. But emotionally, this was the hardest thing for me.”
I ask him how he managed to get on stage. Something flickers in his eyes—grief, resolve, maybe both.
On that stage in Spain, every message he sang to the students, he was also singing to himself. His shlichus was to sing for these students. His talent was on loan from Hashem.
Then he thought about Shabbos. “There’s no better way to honor my parents,” he realized. “I have to do this,” he told himself. Not someday. Now.
He reached out to Rabbi Gedaliah Zlotowitz, and together with author Yisroel Besser, they began shaping The Music of Shabbos: Elevating Our Shabbos Zemiros with Notes of Inspiration.
It would become both a book and an album, gathering 127 zemiros from every corner of the Jewish world, Sephardic and chasidic, Carlebach and contemporary, melodies Ashkenazic families had sung for generations alongside songs composed by Sephardic poets centuries earlier.
Working with producer Doni Gross, Yaakov entered the studio certain he already knew which songs belonged. Doni had other ideas. “Before we say no,” he told him, “demo it. Learn it. Sing it.”
Again and again, songs Yaakov assumed he would reject moved him instead. “Doni was very smart,” Yaakov says. “He told me to stay open. I thought I already had my list, but the songs surprised me. I was in tears doing this project. I don’t remember feeling such emotion on any other recording.”
When he describes the recording sessions, there’s a reverence in his voice. This wasn’t just another album; it was sacred work.
In the studio, he realized how vast the landscape of Shabbos music truly was. He reached out to arrangers who had shaped generations of Jewish sound: Mona Rosenblum, Yisrael Lamm, Moishe Laufer and Ruvie Banet.
“They were all so happy to do it,” he says. “They understood this is what klal Yisrael is missing. Kids won’t listen to the old recordings anymore. The sound feels dated. But if we package these songs with great sound and great delivery, they will listen.”
“We’re all together as one,” Yaakov reflects, “coming from totally different backgrounds.”
For him, the book and album are more than a project. They are a living Kaddish, a way for the sound and soul of Shabbos to keep traveling through generations.
Even as he worked to preserve these communal songs, Yaakov found that music remained his most personal way of processing his loss. For him, music is a language of longing, “the pen of the neshamah,” as the Baal HaTanya called it, a way to know himself and reach for Hashem.
When grief over his parents rises, he sings the songs they sang together, many of them Yiddish melodies he loved long before he fully understood their words.
“So many times when I was in a low place thinking about my parents, I would sing the songs we sang together,” Yaakov says. “A lot of the Yiddish songs that Mordechai Ben David recorded, I didn’t really understand the words. I would go to my mother, who came from a chasidic background, and she would go over it word for word with me. I’d write it down, listen again, and then the meaning would settle into me, because she taught it to me so well.
“We did it together,” he says. “I get emotional over them now.”
He’s quiet for a moment. When he sings those songs now, she’s there.
What his mother gave him was more than translation. She gave him a way inside, a way for the song to live within him. This was the inheritance Yaakov felt called to carry forward, not just to record but to live and pass on. The songs endure because they are bound to something eternal: at your table, at mine and at tables yet to be set.
Shabbos is called a delight, V’karasa laShabbos oneg, the most cherished of all days, chemdas hayamim. It is a taste of the world to come, a place where the human being feels at home with the Divine.
For six days the world was formed, shaped and brought into being. What was created on the seventh day? Stillness, tranquility, peace. With Shabbos came menuchah, and creation was complete.
The songs of Shabbos carry that menuchah forward through the week, through the years, through generations.
Shabbos itself sings.
Zeh shir shevach shel yom hashvi’i…V’yom hashvi’i meshabei’ach v’omer: Mizmor shir l’Yom haShabbos.
When Adam Harishon first encountered the stillness and radiance of the seventh day, he lifted his voice in song. And in our own small way, every time we lift our voices on Shabbos, we join that first song.
This is the inheritance Yaakov felt called to preserve. Not for his children alone but for yours and mine. For tables yet to be set, for voices yet to be raised.
“The songs will outlast all of us,” Yaakov says. “That’s the point.”
All week long, I live on that empty island. And every Shabbos, without fail, it fills again with eternity. ●