Jewish Men’s Choir Brings Joy in Several Languages

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – What once was a choir featuring the voices of male expatriates from South Africa has become a choir of many international voices performing not only Jewish liturgical music but also secular songs in Yiddish, Ladino, Hebrew, and English.  Choir members hail from countries around the world, among them the U.S., South Africa, France, Romania, Guatemala, Mexico, and Israel.

The San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir initially gathered expatriates who had performed in their South African synagogues and knitted them into a group singing the synagogue melodies with which they had been raised. In Orthodox and traditional Judaism, the prohibition against men listening to kol isha (a woman’s voice) precluded the establishment of mixed choirs, so male-only choirs were the norm.

Under the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir’s first director, South African expatriate Rhoda Gaylis, the repertoire was limited although well received. Additions to what songs the choir sang, and even how those songs were presented on stage, came after Gaylis’ retirement and the appointment 12 years ago of San Diego native Ruth Weber as the choir’s new director.

During Gaylis’ reign, production of an album had begun. Because of technical glitches that swallowed some of the recordings, it was not completed until, after an interim director’s tenure, Weber came aboard.  Weber decided that in addition to the Jewish liturgical music, the Heritage album should also include some selections from Yiddish musical theatre and a couple of Ladino songs.

The group’s second album, Kochi, was an even greater departure. “I am a member of the Recording Academy – the Grammys – and I became friends with a guy named Ricky Kej from India,” Weber recounted. “A lot of members in my choir had at one time gone to India, to the places where Jews had lived after they escaped the Spanish Inquisition. I was telling Ricky about it and said it would be really cool to take some historical songs and use some instruments from India, so we could see how those songs might have been performed in a synagogue in India. He said, ‘Yeah that would be amazing.’”

So, accompanied with sitars and other Indian musical instruments, the choir recorded the songs. “We called the album Kochi in recognition of the Jews from Kochin,” Weber continued. “Fortunately, we were already working on that project with Ricky when he won his first Grammy because I don’t think we could have gotten the opportunity if he had already won one. We got a lot of exposure. He did a third album and we got to sing one of the songs on his album… So, we’ve gotten to do projects with him, and he has gone on to win two other Grammys.”

The San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir’s third album, Legacy, was released during the pandemic. “We had a lot of vocal recordings that we had done that we were saving up to do an arrangement for release later,” Weber said.  “We didn’t have any instrumental tracts, except for piano accompaniment. … Because instrumentalists were not working that much during the pandemic, I was able to contract some really talented musicians from all over the place for variable amounts of money! … We rehearsed on Zoom, and we released a couple of Zoom videos, with all the guys singing in their little squares.  The instrumentalists recorded their parts at their home studios and then sent them to me and we had an engineer put them together.”

Creating the albums has been among the highlights of Weber’s tenure with the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir, which averages 20 in-person concerts a year. Weber introduced “choralography” to the group, so instead of just standing in one place during the concert, members of the choir move around in unison, exchange places with one another, and make the productions quite snappy.  At first, the men in the 25-member choir were a bit hesitant about choralography, but after they tried it, they enjoyed it and have fun with it, Weber reported.

Weber came to the choir with a strong musical background. She received a bachelor’s degree in music from San Diego State University and then earned a master’s degree in music from Cal State Northridge. A pianist, she studied the art of accompaniment, later performing with opera singers in the U.S. and abroad. She also is a songwriter, having won grand prizes in the John Lennon songwriting competition, and the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. Among other accomplishments, she was the choral arranger and conductor for the soundtrack of the 2019 movie One Little Finger.

In addition to her role as director of the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir, Weber serves as an adjunct professor of music at Palomar College and at San Diego Miramar College. Her children also are quite musical.  She collaborates with her daughter Emilia Lopez-Yañez in the Ruth and Emilia duo that records children’s music. They’ve gone on two West Coast tours, and have won various awards, including the Parent’s Choice Award.  Songs based on poems written by Ruth’s grandmother, who escaped the Russian Empire about the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, were set to music and released in a 2021 music video, I Had a Dream—Songs of an Immigrant.  Emilia is the vocalist and oboist while Ruth is the pianist on that video, which has been incorporated into the online exhibit of the ANU museum in Tel Aviv.

Ruth’s son, Enrico Lopez-Yañez, is a conductor, having led the Omaha Symphony, and he is now under contract with symphony orchestras in Nashville, Dallas and Orange County, California.

Before assuming the directorship of the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir, Weber directed the choir at Ner Tamid Synagogue in Poway and coordinated the JUMP Festival (Jews United in Musical Performance), the latter of which brought her to the attention of the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir.

On Veterans Day, Nov. 11, in conjunction with the San Diego Saints Choir of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir plans to participate in the California Festival: A Celebration of New Music, which is sponsored by the symphony orchestras of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

The San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir will be one of seven choirs from the San Diego/Tijuana region that will be featured in holiday programming on KPBS and on the PBS App on the weekend following Thanksgiving, according to Benjamin Thiele-Long of the Choral Consortium of San Diego, which coordinated the production of the holiday special.

The choir, with only 17 of its members in town, recently filmed its segment at Congregation Beth Israel. Weber selected three songs, totaling a little less than nine minutes. They were a new arrangement of “Ma’oz Tzur (Rock of Ages)”; “We Are Lights: The Chanukah Song” by Stephen Schwartz; and a mashup by Linda Spevacek titled “Hannukah Nagila,” Weber said.

KPBS filmed from several camera positions, including one from a descending crane, Weber recalled. “It was way different because there was no audience there; just us and the camera crew.”

In other news for the choir, Weber said that a documentary titled Ale Briter (All My Brothers) will be completed in December.

Weber, who is Jewish, said she likes the idea of a Jewish all-male choir because it brings together men who come from the diverse movements of Judaism, stretching from Reform through Orthodox. “I’ve learned so much about my heritage and all about the different levels of Judaism and what they do or don’t do when they worship,” she said. “I find that so interesting because this is my heritage, though I didn’t explore it very much.”

She added that she likes the sound of an all-male chorus. “We’ve taken four-part music (for mixed choirs) and have done it for four-part men’s voices” – Tenor 1, Tenor 2, Bass 1 (Baritone) and Bass 2.  “I like that sound a lot and I also made them really push their sounds,” she added. “When You Believe,” a song by Stephen Schwartz from the animated Disney movie The Prince of Egypt required some members of the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir to sing in falsetto.

Weber said the choir welcomes younger men to audition for the group. She said she hopes she can find male singers under the age of 60, or even younger, to join the ranks. “We have guys all the way to 93 and they are still doing choralography,” she said.  “In the past years, we had young guys, but they graduated school or got jobs in other states. We want to make sure that the heritage of this music keeps going.”

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Donald H Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com