גודל הטקסט
Many assume that "Am Yisrael Chai" is an ancient melody. In practice, the tune sung today was written in the spring of 1965, and one can name almost the exact date of its birth.
The man behind the request was Jacob Birnbaum, founder of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, which was established in New York in April 1964. Birnbaum wanted the young movement to have songs of its own, and turned to two people: Sherwood Goffin and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. According to The Forward, Carlebach was hard to reach, and Birnbaum passed his request through the Rabbi's mother. He asked for a melody for the words "Am Yisrael Chai."
Carlebach was then traveling in Prague, and the song was written there and, according to The Forward, even sung for the first time there. On April 2, 1965, he phoned Birnbaum and announced that the song was ready. Two days later, on April 4, it was played at the movement's rally in New York, near the Soviet mission to the UN. The sources do not agree on where it was first sung: Wikipedia notes the rally as the first public performance, and The Forward mentions an earlier performance in Prague.
The words did not begin there. Wikipedia documents the phrase's earlier incarnations as early as a Zionist songbook from 1895, in songbooks and at Jewish congresses in the 1930s, and in a BBC record of a Shabbat service held in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, a few days after the liberation. Birnbaum himself remembered that the words were heard in Nazi Germany and in the displaced persons camps, but stated that at the time he approached Carlebach they had no active melody in use. This source is an article by Alan J. Gerber in the Jewish Star from 2014.
Carlebach's innovation was in the combination. Alongside the phrase he added a line that rests on the scene of Joseph's revealing himself to his brothers in Genesis 45, and so the sentence gained a direct biblical context. The musicologist Tina Frühauf, as she is cited on Wikipedia, interpreted the change he made to the language of the verse as an address to the Holy One, blessed be He, as a father to His children. This is the interpretation of one scholar, and not an agreed fact.
The song quickly became a symbol of the movement in the United States and in the Soviet Union, and was a central part of its annual rally between 1972 and 1991. Glenn Richter, one of the movement's activists, later called it a kind of second anthem. From then on it left the context of that campaign and was heard at many Jewish events, until many do not even know that it had such a moment of birth: one telephone call, two days before a rally.
Sources: The Forward; The Jewish Star; English Wikipedia (Am Yisrael Chai)
Image: Mattsjc, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.