Basya Schechter and Avi Fox-Rosen Courtesy of Avi Fox-Rosen
By Rukhl Schaechter
June 19, 2025
The Hadar Institute, an educational institution on the Upper West Side of Manhattan has long been known for its high level of Torah learning and its promotion of traditional, yet completely egalitarian religious communities.
One of the more innovative projects run by Hadar is the Rising Song Institute — an intimate concert series that blends Jewish text, storytelling and song.
This summer, for the first time, the salon is highlighting Yiddish poetry. On Tuesday, June 24, two renowned Jewish singer-songwriters, Basya Schechter (best known for her band Pharaoh’s Daughter) and Avi Fox-Rosen, will perform a classic work of Yiddish literature — Itsik Manger’s Khumesh lider (Bible Poems). The work is a humorous (some might say, irreverent) reimagining of biblical characters as Yiddish-speaking men and women in pre-war Eastern Europe.
Schechter and Fox-Rosen will provide context to each piece in this unique conversation-and-concert style event.
In an interview with the Forward, Hadar’s director of tefillah and music, Rabbi Deborah Sacks Mintz, said that there’s “a real hunger” in Jewish spaces for Yiddish.
“One of the things that’s central to being Jewish is that we’re always wandering, always searching and always trying to understand the self in relation to community,” she said. “Having the opportunity to tap into the different languages, textures and sounds of different moments in Jewish history is so incredibly profound.”
The Khumesh Lider event is one in a three-part weekly series highlighting that diversity. The second part will focus on piutim (liturgical poems) from the Middle Eastern and North African Jewish traditions, while the third session will dive into the soundscape of Jewish American folk music and what it means to create midrash through that lens.
“These are all different access points into making the work of the wandering Jew artistic and alive, and I think that people are deeply craving that,” Sacks Mintz said.
On a related note, Sacks Mintz will be performing in Yiddish herself at a different venue on July 11. As part of a new duo project called ReynHartsik (the Yiddish word for “heartfelt” and “sincere”), she and fellow musician Yoshie Fruchter will explore Yiddish poetry, loshn-koydesh, prayer, and nigun at a session of the music festival Yidstock, in Amherst, Mass.
