7. "Berl's Niggun"

^{Community singing, wedding of Eliezer Lipa, son of the Rebbe of Spinka,Jerusalem, 29 August 1982.}

A pan-Hasidic dance niggun, sung on various occasions. Bratslav Hasidim sing it mainly at the Sabbath Inauguration service (Kabbalat Shabbat), to the seventh stanza of the poem "Lekhah dodi" ('Ve-hayu limshissah shosayikh"; see below, no. 11). Nachman Burstein (b. 1934), one of the menagnim of the Bratslav Hasidim in Jerusalem, ba'al-teftllah of a synagogue in Old Katamon, Jerusalem, who sings "Lekhah dodi" to four or five different melodies, sings this niggun with the fifth stanza ("Hit'oreri hit'oreri'). The Toledot Aharon Hasidim, however, sing it when the groom is accompanied to the synagogue on the Sabbath before the wedding. It was nicknamed "Berls niggun" after the Rabbi of Safed, R. Mordechai Dov (Berl) Zilberman (1909-1959), who liked to dance to its music at the Lag ba-Omer Hillula at Meron. He also sang it to the words "Hallelu et adonay kol goyim" and "Hodu ladonay ki tov" of the Hallel prayer (see Mazor 2000, pp. 35-37). In this recording, the young men accompanying the groom to the wedding canopy sang the melody with extraordinary fervor, accelerating to a much faster tempo than usual when the niggun is used for dancing. The section chosen for this compact disk is sung at the fastest tempo, and the singers accompany themselves with increasingly louder clapping.