Rabbi Shragi Gestetner was born to make music.
He started composing when he was 12. He sold his first song at 18. His debut album, Shragee, pulsates with the joy of a man who has found his calling. The year after it came out, Tablet called Gestetner one of the “rising talents of the current generation” of Hasidic music.
“His voice was the sound of music,” said Gershy Moskowits, the producer who discovered him. “It sounded like a violin playing.”
But when Gestetner died at Mt. Meron on Thursday at the age of 33, he had already left his music career behind. Dozens of songwriting credits and a solo album had given him a taste of celebrity, but the work playing weddings and fundraising dinners up and down the Eastern Seaboard occupied his nights and weekends. So several years ago, with four children at the time, he walked away from the music scene to pursue life as a family man.
From Across the Oceans
From Montreal and Manchester, Buenos Aires and Teaneck, each of these very different people had made their own way to the same destination
As the outpouring of grief across Israel and beyond has made clear, Meron 2021 will go down as a tragedy of the entire Jewish People 45 holy souls, Jews of all types, who died minutes after beseeching kera ro’a gezar dineinu.
But of the many thousands drawn to the elevation of Rabi Shimon last week, and the hundreds who entered the horror that was the tunnel of death, one group stands apart.
From different cities, countries, and continents, they’d waved goodbye as they boarded a plane to learn in yeshivah and grow in kollel, to spend time in Eretz Yisrael or go directly to Meron. From Montreal and Manchester, Buenos Aires and Teaneck, each of these very different people had made their own way to the same destination.
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4 Americans believed killed in festival stampede in Israel
Ultra-Orthodox Jews mourn during the funeral of Moshe Ben Shalom at a cemetery in Petah Tikva, Israel, Friday, April 30, 2021. Moshe Ben Shalom and dozens of others died during a stampede at a religious festival attended by tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Mount Meron, northern Israel, early Friday. It was one of the country s deadliest civilian disasters. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
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