Prayer

Hawa Alberstein, Voice of Israel

All of her family, who remained in Poland, died. They were killed, strangled by gas, disappeared without a trace. Her parents were saved, managed to flee from Poland to the USSR, found themselves in Kazakhstan. After the war, the parents returned to Poland, and there she was born - the girl Eve, later, in Israel, who took the name of Hava.

Father, a music teacher, taught her to play on the accordion, but she did not want to know anything but a guitar. Simple acoustic guitar - but how much can be expressed. It was the sixties when people with guitars took possession of the world and ether - Hava Alberstein listened to Joan Baes and Bob Dylan, they connected rock and poetry, their bitter, dreary songs lived in their bitter, dreary songs. She saw Peter Siger on stage in Haifa, with a guitar in his hands and five more behind him, which he took one after another during the concert.

She took the pure simple essence of Rock-n Roll-be yourself, drop and throw away all the superfluous, all the sparkles and things, and go to the stage not in makeup, but with your open, undisguised face.

She poured her unique Jewish folk into rock - a millennial longing, the will to life, the dead relatives behind her, love. A small, fragile girl, she went out with a guitar in front of the soldiers of the IDF and sang songs to Yiddish - the language of scattering, the language of the ancestors, the language of destroyed places. She became the voice of Israel - the voice of people who grew gardens in the place of the desert, created high -tech and climbed the serpentine to the Tsfat to hear the voice of the Kabbalist Rabbi Luria. And having received an order to mobilize, they lined up in line.

Hava Alberstein, the voice of Israel, sings his prayer.

Listen to her and look at the faces of those who listen to her in the hall. This is 1973, immediately after the war. The war was imprinted on the faces of men. Some have not yet removed the military uniform. The war, which began as a disaster of Israel and ended with a victory, in which there is more bitterness and silent memory of the dead than a triumph.

“Everything that we ask is about is so it will happen.”