Preserve. Adapt. Teach. So the next generation grows up singing. Free for Jewish schools.
JEWISH revives old Jewish songs for a wide modern audience, in Russian and in English. The songs are written for licensing: for musicals, films, albums, singles, and artists.
"Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah" is one song carried by four generations of voices. Born in Yiddish as "Khanike, Oy Khanike" (Mordkhe Rivesman, around 1900). Reborn in Hebrew as "Y'mei HaChanukkah". It travelled into English in the early 20th century. Now it lives again in this new English production by Walter J. Kin and Riglis Band, the same chain, still moving. This is what the school does, one song at a time.
We are not a record label. We are not an academic archive. We are a teaching project with a recording arm.
The catalog: 100+ Jewish songs reimagined in living languages, without losing the melody, the soul, or the chain of voices that carried them this far.
The mission: get these songs into Hebrew schools, JCCs, summer camps, Sunday schools, and family kitchens, so a Jewish kid in Atlanta or Buenos Aires or Tel Aviv knows them by heart.
Ten years of adaptation work has already expanded this music's potential audience many times over. JewishSong.org is the infrastructure that extends the same expansion into English.
It began in 2017 with one project: take Jewish songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and other languages and bring them into Russian, and later into English, so that audiences who could not access the originals could hear them, sing them, and pass them on.
The Russian adaptations are primarily by Olga Anikina, the St. Petersburg poet whose Russian-language Jewish songbook for this project now spans more than 50 works, and she keeps writing. The English adaptations are by Walter J. Kin (RIGLI), sometimes translated directly from the source language, more often from Anikina's Russian originals.
The method is not translation. It is authorial adaptation: poems that honor the source while standing as literature in their own right. Source attribution is preserved for every song: composers, lyricists, historical context, and the chain of voices that carried each song forward.
"Olga, you are not just a poet, you are a translator of souls. How can you feel so subtly what would seem not to belong to you by blood, but so clearly belongs to you in spirit?"
Irina K. - YouTube listener - Hava Nagila in Russian
Our mission is to tell the world, through Jewish songs in English, the story and the soul of the Jewish people: its hopes and its sufferings, its challenges and aspirations, its achievements and struggles.
We are creating a body of Jewish song in English that can be studied and taught in schools, colleges, and universities all over the world, and loved far beyond the classroom: popularized through contests, covers, and interactive engagement across social media, especially YouTube and TikTok.
JewishSong.org is a growing interactive encyclopedia of Jewish song. Scholars, writers, museums and cultural organizations are invited to contribute. In two to three years it aims to become the global home of Jewish song, in English and Russian: a place where the world listens, reads, and comes to know the Jewish people and their history through their songs.
Songs carried the Jewish story for a thousand years. We are building the versions that will carry it for the next hundred years and beyond.
A platform is not enough. Songs reach the next generation through many channels, and we are building all four.
JewishSong.org, the open song room. Free to listen, free to teach, free to share. Every song with its full history.
Online now, in person soon. A joyful celebration of new songwriting, performance, and arrangement. Open to all.
Recognition for the people who make this music possible: songwriters, performers, composers, arrangers, producers, and sound engineers.
Working directly with Hebrew schools, JCCs, day schools, camps, and family programs: lyric sheets, teacher notes, and curriculum support.
Hebrew schools, JCCs, Hillel chapters, federations, summer camps, synagogue music programs, and Holocaust education centers. If you are a non-profit teaching this music, it is free: the recordings, the lyrics, and the teacher notes are yours to use. Just sign our one-page free-use agreement online.
Just sign our one-page free-use agreement.
The founding team got the project to its first decade. The next century needs more than a founder. We are building an editorial team of moderators, regional curators, song editors, and contest judges, so JewishSong.org keeps growing long after any one of us.
If you are a Jewish music educator, performer, scholar, or producer interested in joining the editorial team, reach out.
Elechka, our Russian-language lead vocalist, records in her Moscow apartment. Her guitar, her phone, her voice. The Anikina-poem Russian catalog you hear is real human studio-of-one work, song by song.
Everything else, Hebrew, English, sacred liturgy, and the reimagined originals, is produced by Walter J. Kin (RIGLI) using AI vocal rendering on the Suno platform. Walter writes every word, every melody, every arrangement. The AI gives him the vocals he could not otherwise hire as a one-person operation. One song can take days, weeks, even months, sometimes hundreds of generations across different instruments, arrangements, speeds, and moods until it feels right. We credit these performances as "Riglis Band" because listeners need a band name to remember.
This is the seed, not the destination. With the right circumstances, partners, grants, a real label, live artists and producers will re-record and elevate these songs. The arrangements are written. The melodies are tested. The audiences are listening. What is needed is the studio and the budget to lift this from a one-person AI-assisted production into the fully-human recording these songs deserve.
If you are a producer, a label, a patron, a singer, or an educator who can help us cross that bridge, write to Walter directly.
A poet, a singer, and a producer who started this project across borders. The editorial team is growing.
Russian poet, novelist, and translator. Author of more than 50 Russian-language Jewish song adaptations for this project so far, including the 2017 reclamation cycle of Holocaust songs from the Vilna Ghetto and beyond, and she keeps writing.
The Russian-language lead vocalist (Moscow) whose interpretations have carried these songs to millions. Featured on Hava Nagila, Hatikvah, Tumbalalaika, and the full Russian catalog. Listeners write from every corner of the Russian-speaking world to thank her by name.
Producer, arranger, and English-language adapter. Founded the project in 2017 with a simple goal: keep these songs alive and share them with new audiences. Records and releases under the artist name RIGLI.
This is your school too. Browse the songs and teach them for free.