Chava Alberstein

Born around 1946 in Poland’s Szczecin, Chava Alberstein relocated to Israel with her family at the age of four. Over the ensuing decades she established herself as CBS Israel’s longest-serving recording artist, issuing close to fifty albums, the majority sung in Hebrew. Although her earliest musical passion was traditional Yiddish song, she gradually absorbed folk, traditional, and worldbeat currents from many regions. Her first Israeli chart success arrived in 1964, the same year she entered military service. Three-and-a-half decades afterward, in 1998, the American label Shanachie issued the U.S. compilation Crazy Flower surveying her career. Still in 1998 she composed melodies for poems by twentieth-century Yiddish writers and recorded the resulting project, The Well, in collaboration with the Klezmatics. Early in 2000 she released the album Yiddish Songs.