The Center for Jewish Communal Music at Mechon Hadar is dedicated to empowering Jewish communities through music.

Read about our new initiative, The Rising Song Institute, based in Philadelphia and powered by Hadar.
 

The Center educates and trains communities—the members as a whole, as well as each community’s leaders—to use music and song to cultivate spirituality, build a sense of belonging and group cohesion, and make synagogue life more meaningful. The Center is led by creative director Joey Weisenberg, a master teacher and Jewish music expert who has been heralded as “the next Shlomo Carlebach or Debbie Friedman.”

Center faculty travel to synagogues and institutions around the country to lead workshops designed to improve their prayer experience. The Center offers numerous programs for training and instruction, so that talented musicians, Jewish leaders, and communal lay leaders are empowered to lead their communities in the process of musical-spiritual development.

Mechon Hadar also offers the practical resources synagogues and other institutions need to carry on these teachings once the workshops are over. The Center for Jewish Communal Music has developed extensive learning materials about Jewish communal music, including albums, online resources, and a book, Building Singing Communities. 

To sample or purchase one of the Center’s albums, Joey’s Nigunim, click here. You can also see his niggunim on YouTube.

See articles about the Center and its work in the Jewish Week, and in the Jewish Journal of Synagogue Music.

Learn about Mechon Hadar’s other Centers of learning here:
➢ Center for Jewish Law and Values
➢ Center for Jewish Leadership and Ideas