גודל הטקסט
There are songs that many people know without knowing who composed them. Many of them came from the hands of Yossi Green, who grew up in Brooklyn in a strict Satmar Hasidic home, in which there were no musical instruments. His biography on English Wikipedia notes that he was born in Bnei Brak in 1955, and that his family moved to Williamsburg to be close to the Satmar Rebbe. According to an article in Tablet Magazine, in his youth he started with a melodica he taught himself, and developed his own system of notation.
The big start came at the yeshiva in Manchester. In 1973, when he was a student there, he wrote "Kol Berama," which became a hit in distant communities. Since then his name has been attached to songs such as "Adraba," "Shamati" and "Dida Bei," and according to an estimate that appears on Wikipedia he wrote more than a thousand melodies that were included in more than one hundred and twenty albums.
Two songs have an especially well-documented story. "Tanya" he composed in July 1985 based on an aggadah from tractate Berachot, and it became famous in the performance of Avraham Fried in 1988; Tablet sees it as the opening of a new direction in Jewish song. "Anavim" was written with Mordechai Ben David sitting beside him, and was intended at first for Ben David's album, but according to Mishpacha it was delayed because arrangers did not find the suitable style. In the end it came out on Green's own album, The 8th Note, in 2008, and Ben David proposed to sing it there.
Tablet tells of his method of work: he looks for texts in the Bible and in the literature of the Sages, writes the melody at the piano, and then chooses a voice that will suit the song. A draft can be born in minutes, but the polishing can take up to two years. Not infrequently, the magazine adds, Rebbes turn to him asking for a melody.
Alongside the hits he also invests in preservation. In 2010 he began a project whose aim was to return to the Shabbat table the zemirot of Reb Dov Berish Halevi Horowitz, a Hungarian composer from before the war, and in 2022 an album of Shabbat zemirot from the melodies of Reb Berish Vishever was released, according to the entry on Wikipedia. In addition he wrote commissioned works, among them "Ha'akeida," commissioned in 1998, according to his biography, and the series of albums "Shades of Green," in which he presented young singers, among them Shlomo Daskal and Shraga Gestetner.
Although he has also performed at Lincoln Center and at Carnegie Hall, most of Green's presence in the world of song is through the voices of others.
Sources: Tablet Magazine; English Wikipedia (Yossi Green); Mishpacha; Arutz Sheva (Israel National News)
Image: Simcha ben Judah the Scribe, 1272, Public domain (PD-Art, PD-old-100), via Wikimedia Commons.