OU Ben Zion Shenker z”l: The Music Fades with the Loss of a Friend By Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

The sad demise of Ben Zion Shenker has left a void which cannot be filled in the world of Jewish spirituality. Our nation has been able to slowly begin to recover from the trauma of the Holocaust partly because of the revival and proliferation of Chassidic music. Ben Zion was the pioneer of this revival and the first to issue a recording of such music. It was exactly sixty years ago that the first phonograph record of Chassidic melodies was released at his initiative, and it was then that the Jewish world was introduced to his mellifluous and inspiring voice, a voice that has become familiar to all of us. In that record, he began the process of preserving the repertoire of the music of the Modzitzer Chassidic dynasty, a national treasure that would have been lost were it not for Ben Zion. That record was soon followed by recordings of the music of other Chassidic groups, and of course the music of Shlomo Carlebach, who considered Ben Zion one of his mentors.