One big happy family

It's the first day of vacation for many religious Jews who only go on holiday after the fast of Tisha B'Av. It's also the Muslim festival of Eid al Adha. The beach front promenade in Netanya is crowded with a mix of Jewish and Muslim families enjoying the refreshing evening breeze coming off the Mediterranean.

The Netanya municipality has organised a free Jewish music concert at the small amphitheatre by the beach. I arrive early because my son is in one of the children's choirs performing in the show.

A few families have trickled in before showtime to sit on the hard stone benches and watch the assembled choirs and orchestra do sound checks and last minute warm-ups against a glorious backdrop of a reddening sun dropping down into the Mediterranean tinting the cloudless sky in shades of azure through pink, coral and orange.

While I suspect that most of the earlybirds are friends and family of those performing, mostly various types of Orthodox Jews from liberal modern to Hareidi, there is also a smattering of Muslim Arab women and girls in hijabs and jilbabs curious about the orchestra tuning up on stage. Quite a number leave when the choir starts their sound checks and it becomes clear that this is a concert of Jewish religious music. But quite a number of the Muslim families stay.

By start time the amphitheatre is so full that the security guards at the gate are turning people away, including family and friends of the choristers. So many people want to attend that many find themselves driving around for over an hour looking for parking. Hundreds of concert goers press up against the perimeter railings from the outside from where they can clearly hear the concert. Hundreds more listen from the lawns and benches of the adjacent promenade.

Amongst the audience who did make it in to the amphitheatre the crowd is still mostly religious Jewish, a sprinkling of secular looking people and a few of the Muslim families I noticed earlier in the evening. They seem to happy to listen to a line up that includes classical Jewish hazzanut liturgical music and the songs of the "Singing Rabbi" Shlomo Carlebach, as well as a rousing Prayer for the IDF sung to the theme of a film about the 1976 Entebbe rescue.

Meanwhile next to me a Hareidi Orthodox family, father, mother and a bevy of daughters, from Bnei Brak alternates between enthusiastically singing along and calling out to people in the crowd they recognise or at children of theirs who ended up sitting a couple of rows ahead. Their bright eyed enthusiasm is as endearing as their constant interruptions are irritating. They are careful to arrange themselves so that the mother is sitting next to me, the girls between them and the father is next to a man. Both father and mother sing along with the concert (and have nice voices), inlcuding the Prayer for the IDF and the Hatikva, Israel's national anthem.

At one point another family a few rows back starts handing around their baby among friends in the audience and the cute chubby little guy arrives at the woman next to me who sings and coos to him until her daughter asks to hold the nipper too at which point he starts to cry and is hastily passed back via friends and strangers alike to his parents. The atmosphere is one of a giant extended family reunion.

On stage the choirs create a wonderful rich sound while the celebrity hazzan soloists perform the sort of cantorial vocal acrobatics, falsettos and Ashkenazi maqqamim that instantly transport me to my childhood synagogue, standing in the women's gallery sandwiched between my mother and great-aunt as they harmonised beautifully and loudly with the hazzan below and the male choir in the choir box directly opposite the women's balcony.

My grandmother's arthritis kept her from walking to shul in the last few decades of her life but she sang the same intricate liturgy with all its coloratura in her fine soprano as she minced the fish and grated the potatoes. Never has food been prepared with such melodious religious devotion as in my Bubba's kitchen.

Her father was a hazzan, her son sang in the synagogue choir, her grandson-in-law sang in a hazzanut choir and often led synagogue services. During her final years he would call her up at bedtime to sing her classic hazzanut pieces and Carlebach songs over the phone to help her drift off to sleep. She would be thrilled to see her great-grandson continuing the family tradition. This month she would be celebrating her 110th birthday. Tonight was a fine way to honour her memory.