“When it was time to get married, it was an arranged marriage, took twenty minutes to meet my wife,” he explained. “I had no idea what marriage was all about. All I wanted was a car, and you couldn’t drive if you weren’t married. And I wanted to have a shtreimel,” the round fur hat Hasidic men wear on Sabbath and holidays, also the purview of married men.
Gothamist has a profile on hasidic pop singer Lipa Schmeltzer. Here's an excerpt:
…[Hasidic pop singer Lipa] Schmeltzer hails from one of the most stringent Hasidic sects, the Skver sect. He was raised in New Square, a Hasidic enclave in Rockland County with a population of 7,000 predominantly Skverer Hasids, where the powerful Skverer Rebbe reigns supreme, and where the most stringent opposition to Schmeltzer’s music took root.
The eleventh of twelve children, Schmeltzer had a troubled childhood. He was abused by his teachers, emotionally and physically. “I got nicknames, and smacked up every week,” he recalled when we met on the Columbia campus, where Schmeltzer is now a student.
“When it was time to get married, it was an arranged marriage, took twenty minutes to meet my wife,” he explained. “I had no idea what marriage was all about. All I wanted was a car, and you couldn’t drive if you weren’t married. And I wanted to have a shtreimel,” the round fur hat Hasidic men wear on Sabbath and holidays, also the purview of married men.
His early influences were Jewish singers, but after getting married at age 20, Schmeltzer worked as a delivery man for a meat and fish store. It was driving around making deliveries in a smelly little truck, hoping for a dollar tip here and there to make the rent, that the singer first heard “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias, and “I Need to Know” by Marc Anthony. Schmeltzer soon found himself devouring other other pop standards—Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Britney Spears.
“I couldn’t live without music,” he told me. “And I wanted to upgrade Jewish music.”
When he began to sing at weddings and bar mitzvahs, Schmeltzer’s talent was obvious, and yet he was met with derision from within the Skver community; his music was too different, too new, too challenging. Though his songs were in Hebrew and Yiddish, mostly with words culled from religious texts, people called him “this new talent who sings like a goy,” Schmeltzer recalled ruefully.
Two weeks after the release of his third CD in 2001, Schmeltzer says the rabbinical court called him in for a hearing and told him there was too much “disco beat” for their conservative tastes. He was forced by powerful community members to place an ad in one of the Hasidic papers apologizing for the CD, which had taken him five years and all of his savings to produce. The album’s title—“Gam Zu LeTovah,” or “This is also for the best”—now seemed painfully ironic.
“They felt that I am bringing them shame,” Schmeltzer explained. And he believed them. He was plagued with feelings of guilt about the talent he couldn’t deny or reign in. In hindsight, Schmeltzer says, “I had guilt about things I should have pride about.”
The rabbinical court also made Schmeltzer promise that his future records would be more conservative, and for a while, Schmeltzer complied with their demands. It was a losing battle. As Schmeltzer put it, “my art bust forth” and with it, further bans. A network of “activists” went from school to school, pressuring principals to ban his music. Signs went up around the neighborhood depicting Schmeltzer’s face with a line drawn through it; his sister spent days tearing them down. Schmeltzer choked up when describing the shame that his father—a Holocaust survivor and great adherent of the Skverer Rebbe—felt during this time.
“He never kissed me,” Schmeltzer said. “He said, ‘By the Hasidim, we don’t kiss,’ but now I know it was because he lost his father, it was very hard for him to connect. And he did show me love. His love was to daven [pray] for me.”…
Read it all here.
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