After 24 years, Israel's prodigal son Yehuda Solomon comes home

A year ago, Yehuda Solomon wouldn’t have dreamed that he’d be back living in Israel and performing for IDF soldiers at army bases around the country. But then, when the lead singer of the Moshav Band moved to Los Angeles 24 years ago to become a Jewish rock star, he never imagined he’d be away from Israel for so long.

“Ever since we met, my wife and I always wanted to return to Israel, but we were very comfortable in LA,” Solomon recalled. “Then one day this past summer, my wife just said ‘It’s time,’ and we moved [back] seven weeks later.”

Several months after the storied Jewish singer from Moshav Mevo Modi’im finally arrived back in the country with his wife and three kids, he sat down to discuss his experiences and reflect on his career from his new home in the Katamonim neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Solomon’s band, Moshav (formerly known as the Moshav Band), was a pioneer of a new era for Jewish music in the early 2000s, with 10 studio albums, an eclectic sound that spans diverse musical genres, and collaborations with many of the biggest names in Jewish entertainment. 

It all got started in a small village in central Israel known at the time as a haven of alternative Jewish culture.

“I had an amazing childhood filled with music,” Solomon said. “My father was the singer for the Diaspora Yeshiva Band, and our family was all musical. My seven brothers are all musicians, and some have gone on to form other bands.

“We also lived next to Reb Shlomo [Carlebach, the legendary and later controversial singer] on the moshav, and I looked up to him. Shlomo was a close friend and a huge influence on me.”

Solomon started writing songs at age 15, and started a band toward the end of his time in high school. The Moshav Band, as it would become known, put out a few albums together in the mid-1990s and started to develop a following among North American students in Israel.

As their reputation grew, the band connected with Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman and got a big break when the philanthropist brought them to the United States to play on college campuses across the country in what was called the Wake Up Tour.

Feedback from the tour, designed to promote Jewish pride and continuity on campus, was phenomenal. 

“We were right out of high school, and the tour was very successful,” Solomon recalled. “At that point, I realized that there was a lot more opportunity in America.”

Several promising connections were made, and by 1999 Solomon and band co-founder Duvid Swirsky had moved to Los Angeles.

“Right around that time, I met my wife, Naomi, who had spent a semester in Israel during her studies at NYU [New York University]. She wanted to make aliyah, while I wanted to stay for two years building my career. But 24 years and three kids later, we were still in LA.”

That changed quickly last summer, shortly after Solomon bought a home in Los Angeles. 

“I was on tour in South Africa at the time, and my wife texted me out of nowhere and said ‘We’re going home. We’re moving to Israel this summer.’ I still don’t understand exactly what sparked her at exactly that point, but when my wife decides something, she gets it done.”

Solomon said the family was advised to start preparing gradually for the big move, but Naomi refused to wait. Just seven weeks after the idea came to her, the family packed its belongings and boarded a flight to Israel.

“It all went really well,” Solomon said. “We found this amazing apartment and got all the kids in school. We felt very blessed. And then a month and a half later, war broke out.”

THE GRUESOME October 7 attack by Hamas, and the ensuing military operation, upended life for virtually everyone in Israel. For Solomon, the uncertainty of the situation quickly became an opportunity.

“I wasn’t sure how this would affect my career, but soon after the war started, I began getting calls to play on army bases. Now I’m playing literally every night at a different base,” Solomon said.

As part of a team organizing barbecues and concerts for soldiers sponsored by American donors, Solomon refers to his tour as sayeret hamusica (“musical reconnaissance unit”).

“This has been an amazing experience,” Solomon said. “Even though I’m being brought to give strength to the soldiers, I feel like I’m receiving more strength from them. Also, on a personal level, I always felt a certain level of guilt that I never served in the army, that I left Israel to chase my career instead, so I’m so happy that I can serve the country in this amazing way.”

Solomon has also flown back to the US three times for concerts since the war started, and says he barely has any free time. It took us nearly three months to arrange this interview, due to his hectic schedule.

Leaving Israel to become a rock star

LEAVING THE moshav as a young man to become a rock star in Los Angeles wasn’t an easy transition for Solomon. 

Moshav Mevo Modi’im, the legendary enclave started by Carlebach and his disciples in the 1970s as a sort of “Jewish Woodstock,” was a tight-knit community of just several dozen families. Most of its residents were newly religious American immigrants who had moved to Israel in rejection of a materialistic way of life.

“I grew up as a hippie kid that didn’t fully fit into Israeli society,” Solomon recalled. “Even though I was born here – after my parents made aliyah after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 – I never felt fully Israeli. The moshav was this American hippie ba’al teshuva bubble, and me and my neighbors always felt different from the other kids in school. We’d come with our knitted sweaters eating whole wheat bread with sprouts, and people didn’t understand us.”

So, moving in his early 20s to the entertainment capital of the world was a big leap. 

“I look back at it now and I’m like, wow, that took a lot of courage,” Solomon said. “I just said, ‘I’m going, or I’ll never know what could have been.’”

When Solomon arrived in the US with Swirsky and the rest of the band in 1999, he met some well-connected producers who held out promises of big-time record deals. 

“We were really excited to try to make it work, and eventually, we succeeded,” he said. “It just took a little longer than I thought.”

It wasn’t easy at first. Soon after their move, the band found themselves broke and homesick in a shared apartment, writing and rehearsing music all day. 

“We had started to realize that this was going to take a lot more work than we thought.”

Deep in self-doubt, Solomon felt he could hear his homeland calling him back. 

“One day, my brother had just gotten a new mandolin, and he was playing an Irish jig called ‘Drowsy Maggie.’ We loved the loop, and we used it in a song about the feelings we were having at the time. That became ‘Come Back,’ one of our most popular songs,” Solomon said.

AROUND THE same time, the music world was starting to take an interest in Judaism as a singer in hassidic garb named Matisyahu burst into super-stardom on the American music scene. Performing reggae songs about Mashiach on stage in his long beard and black coat, Matisyahu inspired Jewish kids everywhere and opened a small door for Orthodoxy in pop culture. 

“His success was a huge inspiration for us and helped us to believe that our dream was really possible,” Solomon said, who is now close friends with Matisyahu.

Eventually, that record deal did come through. In 2005, the band signed a deal with Shout Factory, which had a distribution deal with Sony Music Entertainment at the time. As they streamlined their name from The Moshav Band to Moshav, their 2006 album Misplaced exposed the band to a massive new audience.

“We started playing major festivals around the world,” Solomon recounted. “There’s a whole world of festivals that aren’t necessarily mainstream music, but they’re attended by thousands of people. We played all over Europe, Australia, and California. It was a really amazing time.”

Moshav put out several more studio albums over the coming years, with original “spiritual” lyrics in English that appealed to the masses. But the band scored its biggest win in 2014 with the release of its first album of Hebrew Shabbat songs.

“We didn’t realize at the time how successful it would be,” Solomon said. “We were just trying to connect back to missing that Shabbat experience with Reb Shlomo on the moshav, so we made these albums with that kind of feel.”

SHABBAT VOLUME I and Shabbat Volume II (2018) are the band’s best-selling albums. While the songs are all new renditions of classic Sabbath prayers and liturgy, they are far from traditional. 

Solomon sings in a broad range of musical styles that span from cantorial to Mizrahi to folk to grunge. Even as he taps Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder as his earliest musical inspiration, everything he does is in the spirit of Reb Shlomo Carlebach. The songs on both albums succeed in being fresh and edgy while staying true to their traditional meanings.

Solomon had dreamed of revitalizing Jewish music from an early age. 

“As a child in the 1980s, I was always bothered by what I felt was a lack of quality music in the Jewish world,” he said. 

“Most of the early hassidic rock repeating psukim [biblical passages] was cringe-worthy, and I felt almost embarrassed for the Jewish world. I was very motivated to put out good music with new lyrics that would fill in a space that was needed. Around the time that we started, there were a few people writing original music with inspiring messages, and people demanded more of it. I get so excited when I hear the great new religious music coming out today.”

A new Moshav album based around the words of Tehillim [Book of Psalms] is in the works, he noted.

Solomon said he has remained religiously observant throughout his band’s entire journey, despite the challenges of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. 

“People told me it would be impossible, but I’ve seen that it can be done, and people respect it,” he said. “Some of the other guys in the band went through some ups and downs, but I never felt the need to stop keeping Shabbat, putting on tefillin, or keeping kosher. We presented ourselves as a religious band, and we held ourselves to that.”

Solomon cited examples of other Orthodox music stars sustaining their value systems in their work. “Matisyahu has had his own complicated personal journey, but the first time I met him, he was learning Gemara backstage before a concert. And Alex Clare, who is an incredible musician now living in Jerusalem, once turned down the opportunity to open for Adele because the concert was on Shabbat.”

Now in Jerusalem, Solomon serves as a guest cantor at numerous synagogues around the city but says he is struggling to find a synagogue that feels like home to him. 

“I was the hazan at the Happy Minyan Carlebach shul in LA the entire time I was there, and that was my favorite synagogue ever,” Solomon said. “That was the closest thing to those Shabbatot when Reb Shlomo was on the moshav, and people would come from all over. I haven’t found anything here yet that matches that type of energy.”

The current war notwithstanding, Solomon is looking to build up his career as a solo artist in Israel, even as he continues to play with Moshav in the US. 

“I’ve been connecting with Hanan Ben Ari, Ishay Ribo, and other performers here trying to find my place,” he said. “It’s mainly the American olim here that know me, and I’ll probably always sing mainly in English, but I’d like to try to reach the mainstream Hebrew market here as well.”

Despite the challenges, there’s no place Solomon and his family would rather be.

“Coming back to Israel and being able to perform and connect with people and see them inspired by it is the best feeling in the world for me,” he said. 

“To make a living doing the thing I enjoy most is extremely rewarding.” 