01 / Mission
Preserve. Adapt. Teach. So the next generation grows up singing. Free for Jewish schools.
«Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah» — one song, four generations of voices. Born in Yiddish as «Khanike, Oy Khanike» (Mordkhe Rivesman, c. 1900). Reborn in Hebrew as «Y'mei HaChanukkah». Travelled into English in the early 20th century. Now in this new English production by Walter J. Kin & Riglis Band — the same chain, still moving. This is what the project does, one song at a time.
Why we exist
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 that 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 25-fold. 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 52 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 methodology is not translation. It is authorial adaptation: Russian and English 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 RussianHow transmission works
A platform is not enough. Songs reach the next generation through multiple channels — and we are building all four.
JewishSong.org — the open catalog. Free to listen, free to teach, free to share. Every song with its full history.
Online now, in-person soon — a Jewish-Eurovision-style celebration of new songwriting, performance, and arrangement. Open to all.
Financial recognition for the people who make this music possible — songwriters, performers, composers, arrangers, producers, sound engineers.
Working directly with Hebrew schools, JCCs, day schools, camps, and family-education programs — curriculum support, lyric sheets, teacher guides.
A standing promise
Hebrew schools. JCCs. Hillel chapters. Federations. Summer camps. Synagogue music programs. Holocaust education centers. If you are a Jewish non-profit teaching this music, our licensing fees are waived. Write to us and we'll send the recordings, the lyrics, and the teacher notes.
Reach the editorial team →The 100-year horizon
The founding team got the project to its first decade. The next century requires more than a founder. We are building an editorial team recruited from the Reboot Network — moderators, regional curators, song editors, contest judges — so that 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.
How we make the music
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, the Mixtape 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 of work — 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, musicians, and music producers will re-record and elevate these songs. The arrangements are written. The melodies are tested. The audiences are listening. What's 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, an investor, a singer, or an educator who can help us cross that bridge — write to Walter directly.
02 / The founding team
A poet, a singer, and a producer who started this project across borders. The editorial team is growing — recruited from the Reboot Network.
Russian poet, novelist, and translator. Author of 52 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 2016 with a simple goal: keep these songs alive and share them with new audiences. Records and releases under the artist name RIGLI / РИГЛИ.