Moshe was born on the 20th September 1955 in Ramat HaSharon, Israel. His parents were Yemenite Jews who immigrated to Israel after World War II; as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews they had a culture and background that was distinct from the Ashkenazi (European) Jews who played the major role in establishing the modern state and culture of Israel. As a child he learned to sing not only Israeli and Jewish religious music in the synagogue, but also Greek, Turkish, and Arabic songs, which he performed for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. As a young man, Moshe worked in a print shop, and he served in the Israeli military in the mid 1970s. Moshe began his professional music career as a member of the band Sounds of the Vineyard (artist]צלילי הכרם) along with Daklon and Moshe Ben-Mosh, playing in clubs and at weddings. Their music was distributed by the brothers Asher and Meir Reuveni, who had started informally selling cassette-tape recordings of wedding performances by Daklon and others. This Mediterranean or Oriental style, which had been neglected by the established Israeli music industry, became known as “cassette tape music” or “central bus station music” (after the stalls in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station where many of the tapes were sold). Many of the songs were taken from Greek and Turkish pop, with the words translated or entirely rewritten in Hebrew by specialist lyricists, and the music reworked into Yemeni style. Mediterranean music grew in popularity after 1980 and eventually became a profitable business for the Reuveni brothers. In 1983 Haim Moshe released his first major album, Ahavat Hayay (Love of My Life), with 200,000 sales. This album included two hit songs: “Ahavat Hayay”, a Yemenite-style song in Hebrew; and “Linda”, a Lebanese song which Moshe sang in Arabic. “Linda” was not an immediate hit on Israeli radio, but earned Moshe a following among Palestinians and Arabs from surrounding countries. The success of this album made Haim Moshe a household name in Israel. From the mid-1980s Moshe began to incorporate more “Shirei Eretz Yisrael” into his repertoire. These “songs of the Land of Israel” formed a corpus of standard Israeli songs, many with patriotic themes, developed to promote an Israeli national identity. This helped Moshe achieve greater mainstream popularity in Israel, but also attracted criticism that he was abandoning his Mizrahi musical and cultural roots in a process of “Ashkenazification”. Moshe’s music became popular not only with Israelis, but also with Arabs in surrounding countries. He began to receive fan mail from young people in Syria and throughout the region, and it was even rumoured that during the 1982 Lebanon War, the Israeli and Syrian armies were both listening to his “Linda”. He became a positive symbol Israel within the Arab world, and of Mizrahi culture within Israel. He has been “a bridge between East and West in Israel”. |
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