The Charitonow Greatest Hits: Laura Melnicoff and the Gendered Aesthetics of Chabad Nigunim
On a Thursday night in December, I attended a concert at a private home in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a short walk from where I live. I was there to hear a performance of instrumental Jewish music performed by a quintet led by cellist Laura Melnicoff, a classical musician and a member of the Chabad Hasidic community. The concert was devoted to arrangements of nigunim, a genre of paraliturgical devotional vocal music that is typically sung at gatherings of Hasidic Jews but that has come to be embraced by a variety of Jewish communities, both Orthodox and liberal. In the Chabad Hasidic community, nigunim are a key signifier of spiritual experience and a marker of group identity—as ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff wrote, singing nigunim is a way for members of Chabad to perform their identity, communicating to themselves and their fellow singers a sense of memory and interconnection. Performing nigunim as an instrumental music genre offers a somewhat different take on the communalistic function of these melodies. While the melodies continue to signify as a form of in-group knowledge, they are transformed into a vehicle for individual expressiveness, not primarily as a group participatory experience.
The concert Melnicoff was presenting was focused on a repertoire of nigunim composed by one family of Chabad Hasidim, the Charitonows. The program was titled the Charitonow Greatest Hits, a slightly jaunty sounding name for a program of meditative Jewish melodies, but not exactly inaccurate. The Charitonow repertoire includes some of the most well-known Chabad nigunim, including two of the piyutim (liturgical prayer poems) from the Kol Nidre evening service: the ubiquitous melody for Ki Hinei Kachomer and a melody for Ya’ale, also referred to by the Yiddish title Tatenyu (daddy). The group in attendance was drawn from a variety of walks of life of Jewish Brooklyn, including individuals who by their attire appeared to be associated with the Chabad Hasidic community, and people with “secular” identities unmarked by visible markers of Jewish religious affiliation.
The concert was pleasurable and virtuosic. Both the “hits” and the less well-known pieces had a familiar feeling, but also yielded surprising moments of piquant interest and divergence from the norm. The instrumentalists gave thoughtful and lovely performances. The material, drawn from vocal repertoires typically performed by non-professional singers, was less dramatically virtuosic than the pieces typically played by klezmorim, allowing for a sense of purposefulness and focus. The standout performance was a solo cello etude, an arrangement of a nigun performed entirely pizzicato, creating a classical guitar-like effect. The salon-like atmosphere of the concert closely drew together performers and audience, who sat rapt in attention. At a few moments, members of the audience sang along with the melodies, attesting to the functional qualities of the source material and its continued salience as music of Chabad life.
Like the audience, the performing ensemble included members from different Jewish musical communities. Two of the performers were Chabad women, Melnicoff and keyboardist Mirele Rosenberger, who is frequently heard at event that are focused in the community. The other three players were male instrumentalists who are recognizable performers in the New York klezmer scene: tsimbalist Pete Rushevsky, clarinetist Zisl Slepovitch, and trumpeter Jordan Hirsch. The divide in the members of the ensemble, between genders and between Hasidic and “secular” realms of Jewish experience, highlight some of the conflicts, ambiguities and affordance that Melnicoff experiences in her career and that I will discuss in brief in this short essay. Through an exploration of topics in her musical life that Melnicoff shared with me in an interview, I will touch upon some of the issues around gender and music in contemporary Chabad and Orthodox culture. I also hope to draw attention to the beautiful and important work of musical performance and preservation that Melnicoff and her colleagues are pursuing. This project is ongoing and will continue to be heard in the New York Jewish music future.
from Melnicoff’s Instagram
Melnicoff was born into a musical and intellectual secular Jewish family, growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She attended the prestigious public LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, where she studied cello. At around 16 years old she began her journey towards Orthodox Judaism and Chabad, a branch of Hasidism that engages in outreach to secular Jews and encourages them to embrace one specific practice of Orthodoxy. She briefly went to college in Cincinnati, but returned to New York, studying at Mannes College of Music, and resumed her affiliation with the local Chabad community and later spent time in Kfar Chabad, a Chabad town in Israel, while working on her masters degree in music at Tel Aviv University. She was married at 770 Eastern Parkway, the center of the Chabad movement in Crown Heights Brooklyn, During the pandemic she and her young family moved to Albany, NY, where the Orthodox Jewish community has been steadily growing as a result of an outward move of people from New York City.
At the age of 19, while studying at Mannes, her rabbi sought to help her find outlet for her musical talents working within Chabad contexts. He was cousins with a member of the planning committee for Kinus Hashluchos, an annual conference of Chabad women outreach workers from around the world who gather in Crown Heights. The goals of the conference focus on professional development for pastoral workers. The music director for this annual event is Mirele Rosenberger, an older member of the community (and a participant in the Charitonow concert, mentioned above). At the conference Melnicoff performs as part of a band that plays short musical interludes between speakers, as well as accompanying featured singers. As is customary in the community, the Kinus Hashluchos gathering is all-female, including the band, creating an opportunity for women’s performance to be featured at a high-profile communal event (an exception is made for rabbis giving addresses to the group). The repertoire they play includes Chabad nigunim as well as more recently composed songs on devotional themes, usually in English, that are in a pop music vein. The arrangements, the reliance on pop drum beats and the sound of the keyboard synthesizer, are all specific to the musical landscape of contemporary Orthodox pop music. Melnicoff has also performed at other women-focused events, such as commemorations of Yud’Daled Kislev, a holiday specific to Chabad Hasidim that celebrates the wedding anniversary of Reb Menachem Schneerson, the last Chabad rebbe. The set lists for Yud’Daled Kislev events are specific and have to do with religious meanings of the nigunim repertoire.
Melnicoff pictured with the Kinus Hashluchos band. Screenshot from https://www.kinus.com/
Through the publicity afforded by these public events and her circle of social networks in Chabad New York, Melnicoff has built something of a local following. However, these performances have not led to wider performance opportunities in the Chabad community. Melnicoff will not be hired by male band leaders to perform for weddings in Crown Heights and some other Chabad communities, the main form of musical employment in the Orthodox Jewish world, even if she has been invited by the bride. She told me, “I would often be asked, and I would say, run it by your mesader kidushin (wedding officiant).” She developed this answer after facing the awkwardness of being hired by families and then later fired after consultations with rabbis. (Melnicoff later clarified by email that she has at times been hired by “male wedding bandleaders some of whom are very conscious of their ability to make the field more gender-equitable and I’d hate for them to feel that this effort is not seen.”)
The issues around hiring women instrumentalists in the Chabad community have to do with a stringent approach to the halacha (Jewish religious law) concerning women’s voices commonly referred to as kol ishah (Hebrew, voice of a woman). A normative (but far from universal) interpretation of this area of Jewish ritual life in contemporary Orthodoxy forbids women from singing in front of men, thus precluding the possibility of women’s leadership in prayer or participation in community singing events, which are central aspects of Hasidic life. According to Melnicoff, “Many people in the community have no idea that there is a minority opinion that extends kol ishah to instruments. I haven’t gotten a straight answer about the halachic reasoning.” Interpretations of kol ishah are inconsistently applied and depend on the religious opinions of the rabbi of particular Chabad Houses (outreach centers) and reflects their assessments of local norms and needs. Not deeply considered in this ritual discourse among male leaders are the needs of women artists like Melnicoff. The fact that women’s performance is forbidden at 770, the center of the Chabad world, has a chilling effect on hiring opportunities for Melnicoff within her community.
As a professional musician, a woman, and a Hasidic Jew, Melnicoff found obstacles to being able to fully access the social networks of Chabad that are intended to uphold the community and provide for its members. As a mother with young children, she needed support from her community in the form of help getting work but found that many musical performance opportunities within Chabad were closed to her because of her gender. The opportunities available to her playing at all women events were frustratingly insufficient. As a movement that encourages non-Orthodox Jews to embrace Orthodoxy, Chabad has an unusual profile as an area of Orthodox life with a great openness to people who were not born in the community. Yet the integration of women artists into the planned heterogeneity of the Chabad community seems to point to areas of limitations on the flexibility and openness of the system of kiruv (Orthodox outreach to non-Orthodox Jews).
In her recent book, For Women and Girls Only, anthropologist Jessica Roda documented the rise of Orthodox women’s art movements in the last decade. An ecosystem of Orthodox women stars has emerged in parallel to the well-established male Orthodox pop scene that has played a central role as the dominant music of Jewish Orthodoxy since the 1970s. As Roda notes, the Orthodox women’s music scene creates opportunity for expressiveness that remains compliant to the gender norms of the community, subtly pushing at the boundaries of social convention while maintaining overt allegiance to systems of religious hierarchy and the sanctity of women’s prescribed place within Orthodoxy. This has led to an expanded economy of art made specifically by and for women, a striking development that defies expectations of insularity in Hasidic women’s life. Melnicoff said, “There’s a lot of power in all-women’s spaces.” She witnessed this in 2023 when she played in the all-female orchestra backing up Orthodox star Shaindy Plotzker for three sold out nights at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Melnicoff sees the rise of what she referred to as the “kol ishah sector” as being primarily a product of the Haredi world outside of Chabad, with women artists drawn more from Litivsh (non-Hasidic separatist Orthodox) communities and the chagas chasidim (non-Chabad Hasidic groups). This is perhaps in part because Chabad already has a more flexible approach to gender norms than other separatist Orthodox groups, inflected by its influence from recent “born again” Jews, and marked by the prominence of women religious functionaries such as the aforementioned women outreach workers. Beyond the location of Orthodox women’s pop outside of Chabad, Orthodox pop also represents a different aesthetic and social concept than Melnicoff is pursuing with her musical endeavors. Orthodox women’s pop music is focused on themes of women’s empowerment achieved within the structures of normative Orthodoxy and finds its key creative outlet in lyrics that celebrate themes of Jewish religious traditionalism. Musically, it hews to a well-worn harmonic, melodic and instrumental palette associated with pop culture and is not explicitly connected to the sounds of Orthodox Jewish music of prayer in terms of form or timbre.
When I asked Melnicoff if she wanted to work more in the “kol ishah sector,” she expressed ambivalence about the musical possibilities available, telling me “The vibes have to be right…the women’s space grows out of exclusion. There are things I couldn’t conquer. The lack of resources [in Orthodox women’s musical education] was really apparent. I play an instrument. I’m interested in abstraction. I feel restricted by content having to be all Jewish…There are a lot of benefits to what they [kol ishah artists] are doing, but I’m not gonna become a Jewish woman singer songwriter. Classical music is not universally seen as safe [in Chabad]. I can’t just do what I always did [before she became Orthodox]. A recital of that [classical music] in a major hall would make a splash and maybe not be accepted. [In comparison] Pop songs can be so easily adapted, it overcomes suspicions. The skill and training needed for classical music makes it less common.”
The lack of training in and familiarity with classical music and other musical forms that are not over determined as connected to Jewish identity (from the perspective of contemporary Orthodox society) create a sense of distance and discomfort in Orthodox communities in regard to these musical idioms. However, the aesthetics of normative American commercial music have been integrated into the soundscape of Orthodoxy. Melnicoff connects the acceptance of pop in Orthodoxy with its formal simplicity and its familiarity as the ambient sound of the American mainstream. At the same time, she seems to connect her critique of the aesthetic and intellectual limitations of Orthodox pop with the rejection of women’s musical opportunities in the community. “Kol isha is a key to the music world of Judaism. I remember hearing a pod cast interview where someone asked, why is Jewish music so bad? It’s because you cut out half the people.”
To feed her musical ambitions, both artistic and remunerative, Melnicoff, is involved with multiple musical communities. She has continuously developed a career as a classical cellist, freelancing in the New York classical music world. She is also involved in Jewish music outside of Orthodoxy. Pete Rushefsky, director of the New York-based Center for Traditional Music and Dance and one of the bandmates on her recent project, has been a longtime friend—Melnicoff originally was a babysitter for Rushefsky’s children. Through other contacts in the klezmer and Yiddish secular music scene, Melnicoff landed a job as the cellist in the orchestra for the successful Yiddish-language revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Melnicoff also worked with klezmer musician Ira Temple in a long running regular concert series of Yiddish song produced for elder women in a senior center in the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Melnicoff notes the special power of Yiddish music to connect to disparate segments of the Jewish community. “The Satmar women, who I assumed would be so insular that even I couldn’t access, but they were so happy to hear this music.”
Melnicoff’s current project on the Charitonow nigun repertoire mediates between the Yiddishist musical scene and the world of Chabad music, but working in a musical idiom far removed from most musical productions emanating from the Hasidic community. Originally the project was suggested by Pete Rushefsky. Rushefsky was acquainted with a Chabad rabbi, a descendant of the Charitonow family who had preserved musical scores of nigunim from his illustrious musical ancestors: Avrohom Charitonow of Nikolaev, Ukraine (1840-1912), and his sons Aaron (1873-1933), Moshe (c. 1865-1949) and Sholom (1886-1934). These men were composers of nigunim who held close relationships with past Chabad rebbes. The Charitonow grandsons in American were also involved in nigun performance, as can be heard on the 1973 record release “Nigunei Sholom,” which features Samson Charitonow performing his father Sholom’s melodies.
The Charitonows are represented by about 40 melodies included in the canonical Sefer Hanigunim anthology of Chabad melodies, which includes 357 melodies in total. Focusing on this prestigious repertoire, and with the support of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, Melnicoff successfully applied for a grant to produce concerts. She has used this opportunity to hire musicians from both Chabad and klezmer music scenes (the concerts have featured a partially rotating cast of performers).
The venues of performance similarly draw on Melnicoff’s multiple worlds of musicianship. One concert in the series was held at Congregation Ahavas Yisroel in Crown Heights. At this event, an intergenerational group of women of Charitonow family members were in attendance, a particularly satisfying experience for Melnicoff.
Screen shot from Melnicoff’s Instagram
As a point of departure for creativity and exploration of Chabad heritage, Melnicoff seeks to leverage this project towards expanding the scope of her musical vision and practice. “I want to experiment more with the sound of it. The power the songs have is really apparent. They are such hits! This was a really significant project but to some extent it’s just beginning.”
Works Cited/Further Reading
Jessica Roda, For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2024).
Ellen Koskoff, Music in Lubavitcher Life (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
“Contemporary Jewish Music in America 2000–2020: A Symposium,” ed. with Judah M. Cohen. Journal of Synagogue Music 46.1 (2021).