When marking Jerusalem Day, you will be sure to hear the monumental song "Jerusalem of Gold" - probably the most popular of the songs written since the establishment of the State of Israel, and which has since received hundreds of performances. And when you talk about it, you connect it directly to Shuli Nathan, the singer who first performed it on May 15, 1967, at the Song and Chorus Festival held at Binyanei HaUma in Jerusalem. It happened less than a month before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, at a rare moment when all the stars lined up and saluted the budding singer.
"Why did this song catch on this way?" Nathan tries to answer the question when we meet at her home in Ra'anana. "Maybe because he's a wall-to-wall coalition. Everyone loves him, and there is no political controversy about him. People may try to associate him with one of the camps, but he doesn't belong there. I didn't aim for a political side, certainly not as a 20-year-old girl. I love people."
Natan currently divides her time between Kibbutz Beit HaShita, where her partner, Abie Levy, lives, and Ra'anana, where she spent most of her life. We meet to find out how lightning struck an anonymous singer 56 years ago who had no plans to become a star.
Nathan's parents, Chava Nathan and Joshua Bornfreund, met in London after fleeing the Nazis during World War II. Joshua made the journey to England from Slovakia, while Eve came from Hamburg, Germany. Natan was born in March 1947 and immigrated to Israel with her parents two years later. The family first settled in Wilhelma Colony (today, Bnei Atarot) and later moved to the Ramat Chen neighborhood in Ramat Gan. Despite her artistic skills, Natan developed a career as a gymnast, even making it to Israel's youth team. But when she was 16, her dream was cut short. A fall from the beam ended her athletic career.
"My mother was smart," Nathan recalls, "She said to me: 'A guitar teacher is coming to the neighborhood, maybe you'll learn?' I bought a terrible Italian guitar from the few savings I had as a camp counselor and financed the lessons with the help of a babysitter I did. My parents had no money, so it's all my effort. It's important for a person to fight for what he loves."
An artistic family for generations
The Nathan family has been artistic for generations. Yehoshua, Sr., was one of the first painters to teach in the art track at WIZO France High School. Abraham Nathan, Shuli's maternal grandfather, was the tenor of the Hamburg Opera. When the Nazis came to power, he changed his name to Albert Nordg so that he could continue singing, and living. But it didn't help, and he was murdered in Auschwitz.
Eve, the mother, was a renowned illustrator. She has illustrated quite a few well-known books, including De Amicis' The Heart and Anda Amir's Stars in Aquarius. When I ask why she adopted her mother's last name, Shuli replies with a smile: "Because my Ashkenazi name was unbearable. No teacher could express it."
Natan studied at Blich High School in Ramat Gan, and Tzipi Shavit was in her class with her. The two used to sing and act in plays and did covers of the Beach Boys, which became a hit in those years - but did not think about a career in the field. "My mother said: 'When you finish the army, you'll study. And if you want, sing in university cafes,'" she mimics a Yaki accent. "Like it was Berlin or Hamburg. I just sang for pleasure."
Haven't you thought about serving in a military band?
"I felt like I was too individualistic and wouldn't get along with a band 24 hours a day. I had no ambitions."
Eventually, she served as a teacher-soldier in the Lachish region. She lives with eight girls in the community of Nahora near Kiryat Gat and went out every day to teach in Moshav Otzem, where immigrants from Morocco arrived in the 50s. At the same time, she continued to study guitar with Rina Ben-Yehuda. Ahead of her students' end-of-year concert, Ben-Yehuda invited Amitai Ne'eman, editor and producer of singing programs at Kol Israel, to him and asked him to pay special attention to Nathan.
Nathan performed "Donna, Donna," originally written in Yiddish, translated in the 60s and performed by Nechama Handel. Amitai was impressed and offered Shuli to audition for the program "First Applause", the first radio version of "A Star is Born". It was a program that ran from 1965 to the early 80s, and in which quite a few names were discovered, such as Gali Atari, Ofra Haza, Hava Alberstein, Yardena Arazi and Avi Toledano.
Nathan appeared on the show at a time when there was no television and people clung to the radio receivers to absorb information and some culture. Among the fans of the show was Hillali (Lali), the daughter of Naomi Shemer, then 12 years old. "She said to Naomi: 'Mom, listen, there's a girl here with a high voice like you like,'" Nathan says. "Naomi told her, 'Write your name on a note and put it in our secret drawer, one day we'll need it.'"
And that day was not long in coming. In Jerusalem, we were preparing for the 1967 Song and Song Festival, which was supposed to take place on May 15, the eve of Independence Day, at Binyanei Ha'uma. The setlist was ready and the performers carefully chosen, but there was half an hour, the time for counting votes, and had to be filled with artistic content.
The organizers asked to order five songs from famous writers. Teddy Kollek, then mayor of Jerusalem, said he wanted the songs to have one about Israel's capital, since there weren't too many new songs about the Holy City. It was Kollek who thought of Naomi Shemer, whom he had known since childhood. Teddy and his wife Tamar were among the founders of Kibbutz Ein Gev, located on the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee. More than once they would cross the lake and come to the Kinneret group to visit Rivka and Meir, the poet's parents.
Six months of writing
Gil Eldama, one of the festival's editors, was the one who asked Shimmer to write a song about Jerusalem in honor of the event. "She said: 'How can a Galilean girl like me write a song about Jerusalem?'" says Shuli. "Eldama said: 'You know what? Go home and don't write.' It's like the kids being told 'no' and they still do. It took her six months to write Jerusalem of Gold. And she finished most of the songs within minutes."
Why did it take so long?
"Because it was a heavy subject. She went to Jerusalem, met with a religious acquaintance, who told her about Rabbi Akiva, and from there the chorus was born. She met Rivka Michaeli, who asked, 'Why didn't you mention the Old City?' So Naomi wrote, 'How did the cisterns dry up?' It's not an entertainment song, it's poetry. Real poetry."
Naomi Shemer. A surprising ringing, photo: Coco
When Naomi Shemer came to the festival directors with the song ready, they asked who would perform it. Shemer then asked her daughter Lee to bring the note that had been kept in a drawer. The organizers said they knew Shuli Nathan, but explained that they do not include amateur singers in the festival. Then Shemer replied: "Without her there is no song."
Nathan had no knowledge of the drama unfolding in Jerusalem. In those days, she taught in Moshav Otzam and taught classes. One day, when she was in her room in Nahora, the secretary of the community approached her and said that her mother had called and was waiting for her on the line.
"I was scared," Nathan recalls. "Who would have called then? Telephones were only in pharmacies and post offices. I said that if Mom called, something must have happened at home. We went to the secretariat, which was a ten minute walk away. Mom was still waiting. She realized I was nervous, so she immediately said: 'Nothing happened, but you'd better sit down.' I sat down and she said, 'Naomi Shemer wants to meet you.' Luckily I sat down, because I was stunned, but in that second I realized that if Naomi, who was already famous, wanted to see me, it meant exposure."
Shemer was 36 at the time, but had already written songs such as "Eucalyptus Grove" and "Tomorrow" for the Nahal Band and "Ayelet Ahavim" for the Yarkon Bridge Trio. "I met her in her small apartment in Tel Aviv," Shuli says. "The grand piano took up almost the whole living room and a 12-year-old girl opened the door, it was Lee. Naomi sat at the piano and played Jerusalem of Gold, almost like a military march. I listened to the beautiful lyrics and saw that it was a lyrical song. I asked if she was ready for me to take the words and notes and come back in a week, try to adapt it."
Shemer said yes, and Shuli went home, wrote an intro for the guitar, as well as the accompaniment, and returned to the poet with the results. "Lally says it's one of two cases in Naomi Shemer's entire career that she's gone silent. She said, 'That's exactly how you're going to sing, I'll just moderate the tempo and harmonies a bit,'" Nathan says. "She wasn't trying to dictate her own adaptation. Maybe I was shy, but also stubborn. I knew what I wanted."
It was a huge occasion for someone who had performed in small halls until then, performances that Herzl, the husband of singer Hadassah Siglov, sometimes associated with. She also sang mostly material she liked from abroad. Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, of course.
"Kol Israel asked, 'Don't sing the song anywhere before,'" Natan recalls. "It was a few months before the festival. And I, because I was so scared of the moment I would face thousands of people, everywhere I went, I sang it. In front of friends, family, I just told them: 'Don't find out.'"
Did you know it's an unusual song?
"I didn't think it was monumental, but I knew I had a very beautiful song. I never dreamed that he would reach these heights, but when I came to the rehearsal, the day before the festival, Shimon Israeli, who was a big name at the time, stood next to me, and he uttered a curse and said, 'Who is this ----, who got such a beautiful song?' So I started to feel better. And there was another thing that predicted success. At the general rehearsal, after I finished, the orchestra stood up and applauded."
With Teddy Kollek. "He pecked most of the festival,"
Those were difficult days in Israel. On the day of the festival, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and entered Sinai. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser put Israel in a state of emergency known as the "waiting period." At its end, the Six Day War began.
In those days, Nasser did not stop provoking. That same month, he told members of the Central Council of Arab Trade Unions: "Egypt expects at any moment an attack from Israel, which will give it an opportunity to destroy it." He also quipped: "If General Rabin wants to try his hand at war, Ahlan and Sahlen."
"In the evening, I arrived at the hall by bus from relatives who lived in the Bayit Vagan neighborhood," Nathan says. "There was a feeling that a second Holocaust was about to come upon us. Everyone who came to the event was very tense and stressed. The festival started with his cheerful songs, and then I was called to come up during the break. I started playing and sang a song longing for Jerusalem, then a divided city. Who dreamed of you being reunited? I remember that as children we would stand near the King David Hotel and look with awe and curiosity at the Jordanian soldiers who patrolled the walls of the Old City. That was reality."
How did you feel during the song?
"Like a leaf blowing in the wind. When I finished, there was a silence of shock, and after the initial recovery the audience erupted in thunderous applause. It was impossible to silence him. Yitzhak Shimoni, who instructed, tried to stop and failed."
Almost no one remembers that at that festival Mike Burstein was the winner with the song "Who knows how much", ahead of Ran Eliran with "Always Renewed" and the Suburbs, who performed "Theresa Beautiful".
Nathan was already in the dressing room when Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek came up to congratulate the winners. "Kollek, who sat in the front row, pecked most of the festival," she recalls. "He went up to greet and then said: 'I ask the girl, the soldier,' and he couldn't even remember my name, 'to sing the song in honor of Jerusalem.' I was running backstage when I heard my name and sang again. The huge surprise was that the whole audience joined me in the chorus. It was such a sensation that the next day they began broadcasting the song non-stop and at the same time mobilizing reserves. We didn't know that the Six Day War would break out soon."
The original album cover of the song,
When she left Binyanei Ha'uma that evening, Nathan was no longer anonymous. During the waiting period, when she saw that there was no point in returning to teaching because no one had a head of study, she went between the Southern Command bases to entertain the soldiers. When the fighting broke out, she and several other artists joined an armored supply convoy that entered deep into Sinai, and reached Bir Tamda with them, where an Egyptian airfield and armored bases were located.
"Suddenly, we heard Motta Gur roaring over the radio, 'The Temple Mount is in our hands,'" Nathan recalls. "There was tremendous excitement, and the armored personnel put me on the tracker's enlisted car, or at least something similar. It was a car deep in the sand, it had no windows, but it had a roof. They brought me up, and of course I sang 'Jerusalem of Gold,' a performance that always brings back memories. But there were also harsh scenes that didn't do me any good. I saw piles of dead Egyptians buried in the sand."
After the War: A New Home
Kollek later asked Naomi Shemer, following the success of the song and following the change in the city's borders during the Six-Day War, to connect another house for him. "All the IDF soldiers stationed in Jerusalem and its environs and all the residents of the capital do not stop singing 'Jerusalem of Gold.' With the changing borders of the city, everyone asks that you add encouragement to sing," he wrote to her in a special telegram sent in June '67. Shemer agreed, adding the stanza that begins with the words, "We returned to the cisterns, to the market and to the square..."
Teddy Kollek's telegram (above), and the added verse in Naomi Shemer's handwriting,
When the war ended, Natan was discharged from the army, but found a letter summoning her to reserve duty. The 55th Paratroopers Brigade, which fought in Jerusalem, sought to adopt it, and it could not refuse, as a symbol of the united city. "During the War of Attrition, I moved between the outposts," she recalls. "It was a story. Sometimes I'd stay, because there were shots fired and it was really dangerous to get out."
Only outside Nathan was waiting for eternal glory. "It became a national song," she recalls. "We had half of Jerusalem, and suddenly it is complete and includes the Western Wall. All the longing entered him and he opened up hidden corners in people. There was even a question: 'Where were you when Shuli Natan sang 'Jerusalem of Gold'?"
"I was a pretty shy girl, and after the war there was a huge demand, which allowed me to skip the torturous path of performing in clubs and catapulted me straight up. There was a show at the time that included me and my uncles, Arik Einstein, Shalom Hanoch, Hanan Yuval. We performed all over the country. I didn't make any personal connections, but it was nice for me. I performed in the Scandinavian countries and Holland. That was before they spoiled our name in the West."
But despite the success, Nathan had a big break in his career. After marrying Matityahu Weiss at the age of 27 and having three children, she found it difficult to combine night performances with family life and decided to focus on raising her children, especially when she later had two more. "I felt like I couldn't dance at two weddings," she admits. "I announced I was taking a break because I wanted to be a total mom."
35 years ago, the singer's career was revived from an unexpected direction. Aviva Rosenfeld, a teacher of Shalach, moved to the neighborhood where she lives in Ra'anana, who had just taken a sabbatical. Their children went to kindergarten together, and Aviva urged Nathan to return to the stage. Since then, Aviva has served as the singer's producer. "As long as the voice doesn't betray me and they want to hear me, I'll sing," Nathan says.
Doesn't age scare you?
"Not particularly. And I don't really feel a change in my voice either. I'm still going high. What does good for people is laughter and music, God loves the clowns and probably the singers too. I performed all over the world and also when VIPs like Bill Clinton and Al Gore landed here. Teddy Kollek always took me when generous guests would come to him. He'd say, 'You'll sing and I'll snort.'"
Being identified with one song is a blessing?
"A great blessing. This is something fundamental, as you cannot change the myth and ethos of a people. The little kids learn the song in kindergarten, so there's no one in the country who doesn't know, and when they meet me and say, 'She sang the song originally,' the kids know what it's all about. It has become the unofficial anthem of the State of Israel."
Do you feel that "Jerusalem of Gold" has a different meaning in 2023?
"Whenever I sing it, I imagine myself standing in Binyanei Ha'uma. It was and remains an innocent song, expressing longing for the Old City of Jerusalem, for places we cannot reach. Most synagogues in Israel and around the world have adopted it as part of their prayers."
These are days when the rift divides us and there are no sacred cows anymore.
"I am mostly close to faith, love to study the Bible and observe the holidays so that there is added value to life. There are so many streams of Judaism, so maybe I don't identify with the ultra-Orthodox, but I definitely identify with tradition. I came from a religious background. I have a family that lives in Moshav Nahalim. I love my religious family members and don't talk to them about these things."
Today is there an attempt to separate religious and secular?
"Anyone who tries to separate is a very bad thing. Forbidden. I would separate church and state. It certainly is. The rift in the nation is like a wound that has opened, like a demon that had to come out. I believe that eventually better times will come. Now it's a revolution, and I hope for a more enlightened government. We need change."
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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