Darkness to light: Noam Sagi speaks at concert fundraiser for Kibbutz Nir Oz

New London Synagogue in St John’s Wood was full for a Chanukah concert fundraiser on Wednesday night.

Funds were raised for Kibbutz Nir Oz, the home of Ada, mother of their member, Noam Sagi, recently released from Gaza.  The kibbutz was destroyed in the attacks of 7 October. Noam was present to share reflections on re-meeting his mother after 53 days of captivity.

As Rabbi Jeremy Gordon explained, the music for the evening was chosen to rise from darkness to light, matching the escalation from one candle to a full Chanukiah. The concert opened with an elegiac solo rendition by Ayala Gottlieb Alter of Hannah Szenes’ poem Eli Eli  and continued with a setting of Naomi Shemer’s Lu Yehi, evocative of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for voice, cello and piano.

Perhaps the highlight of the early part of the concert was a shift of pronouns. The synagogue’s cantorial lead, David Djemal, sang Bring Him Home, from the musical Les Misérables, fusing the original English and Hebrew-translated lyrics. The song was offered as a prayer for the release of the close friend of Djemal’s cousin, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and all the hostages and concluded with a plea to “Bring him home, bring her home, bring them home.” There was not a dry eye in the sanctuary.

The concert had been planned by Djemal and the Israeli soprano and new London member Chen Reiss, but Reiss had to withdraw owing to illness and at the last minute. A Royal Academy of Music student, Maya Sayag stepped in. Sayag sang beautifully, sharing Marc Lavry’s Tsror Hamor, a setting of extracts from Song of Songs, and then stunningly on Donizetti’s Quel Guardo Il Cavaliere, effortlessly hitting top notes that threatened to shatter the newly dedicated stained glass in the sanctuary.

The concert concluded with Sayag and Gottlieb Alter, accompanied on the piano by Marc Verter, performing Hava Narimah, the Hebrew version on a Chanukah theme of the chorus See the Conqu’ring Hero from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus – and warm applause.