malei daas torah
i heard the same guy wrote “hava nagila”
From Wikipedia:
Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, a professor at Hebrew University, began cataloging all known Jewish music and teaching classes in musical composition; one of his students was a promising cantorial student, Moshe Nathanson,[1] who (with the rest of his class) was presented by the professor with a 19th-century, slow, melodious, chant (niggun or nigun) and assigned to add rhythm and words to fashion a modern Hebrew song.[citation needed] There are competing claims regarding Hava Nagila’s composer, with both Idelsohn and Nathanson being suggested.[2][3]
The niggun he presented has been attributed to the Sadigurer Chasidim, who lived in what is now Ukraine,[2] which uses the Phrygian dominant scale common in music of Transylvania.[citation needed] The commonly used text was probably refined by Idelsohn.[4] [5][original research?]
In 1918, the song was one of the first songs designed to unite the early Yishuv [Jewish enterprise] that arose after the British victory in Palestine during World War I and the Balfour Declaration, declaring a national Jewish homeland in the lands newly liberated from Turkey by the Allies and entrusted to Britain under the Treaty of Versailles.[citation needed] Although Psalm 118 (verse 24) of the Hebrew Bible may have been a source for the text of “Hava Nagila”,[citation needed] the expression of the song and its accompanying hora (“circle”) dance was entirely secular in its outlook.[citation needed]
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