Oakland Girls Choir

Rehearsal February 10, 2012

Oakland Girls Tour Choir sings Yiddish Lullaby

“I think it’s a miracle that you can get 30 middle and high school girls to rehearse on a Friday evening,” Robert says as he drops off his 12 year-old daughter for her weekly Tour Choir rehearsal. “I think it’s a testament to the positive things that are going on here.”

The Tour Choir is the founding choir of the Oakland Girls Choirs. The organization started in 2005 with 15 girls in the Tour Choir. The Tour Choir alone has doubled in size since 2005, and the number of students reached has increased ten-fold with the Training Choirs and outreach programs.

The Tour Choir rehearses only once a week, but the girls take on difficult music that is often performed by college and professional women’s choirs. Here they are rehearsing “Schlof Main Kind,” a Yiddish lullaby written for children who lost their mothers during World War II. The lullaby, written by the Belorussian Yiddish poet David Einhorn, celebrates the Yiddish language that abruptly ended in the Holocaust.  Though a lullaby, the haunting melody and intense harmonies will hardly put any listener to sleep. 

The Tour Choir will be performing this song on their spring concert: "Mosaic: Gems from around the world" on May 19.  See www.oaklandgirlschoir.orgZ for more information.

They will also be taking these songs on a week-long tour of Pennsylvania and New York.