Rising Song Institute Summer Gathering

Yoni Avi Battat (he/him) is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer, celebrating his Ashkenazi and Mizrahi ancestry through music. He maintains an active performance schedule across the country and internationally, playing violin, viola, and oud (middle-eastern lute) in collaborative and interdisciplinary projects spanning a wide range of styles. In 2015, Yoni founded his own Yiddish-Jazz band called Two Shekel Swing, which has since released their debut album “Pocket Change,” performed in Toronto’s Jewish Music Week, and opened for Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, amongst other public appearances. Over the past 15 years, Yoni has been immersing himself in maqam, the musical mode system of Arab music. These efforts gave way to his 2022 debut album Fragments, which explores his Iraqi-Jewish identity by pairing maqam music with lyrics in Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Yiddish. From 2021-2022 Yoni toured nationally as an actor and violinist with the Tony Award-winning musical, “The Band’s Visit.” www.yonibattat.com

Aly Halpert (she/her) is a young adult queer Jewish musician, educator, and activist living on Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia, PA, USA. A singer, pianist, drummer, and guitar player, Aly writes songs for building community, working for collective liberation, and visioning different worlds. Aly leads music and prayer for Jewish community, including Kol Tzedek Synagogue, Eden Village Camp, Let My People Sing, and Linke Fligl. Her songs have been sung in national gatherings, song circles, and quiet moments of personal prayer, and have moved people all over the world. Aly loves performing and collaborating with musicians such as Batya Levine, Joey Weisenberg, Anat Halevy Hochberg, Molly Bajgot, & Deborah Sacks Mintz. Her first full-band album Loosen was released in April 2022 with Rising Song Records. Whether her songs are serious or seriously goofy, Aly believes deeply in the power of music to awaken us to the loss and hope we carry, expand our sense of possibility, and connect us to each other and our collective strength. 

Anthony Russell has been a vocalist, composer and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language for the past ten years. Anthony's work with klezmer trio Veretski Pass resulted in Convergence, an exploration of a century of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music. His recent release on the Borscht Beat label with accordionist and keyboardist Dmitri Gaskin, Kosmopolitn, features their original settings of Yiddish modernist poetry for voice and string ensemble. Anthony has also been a culture essayist in a number of publications, including The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, PROTOCOLS, Full Stop Magazine, Ayin Press and Jewish Currents.

Chana Raskin, the founder and main facilitator of RAZA, is an untrained vocalist who grew up entrenched in the world of Chabad Hasidut and its profoundly simple and complex melodies. These nigunim have carried her at every point of her journey through life. Indeed, Chana’s first musical memory is from age four, waking up to a late-night farbrengen (Hasidic gathering) in her family's small Brooklyn apartment. Many of these nigunim have now made their way onto her debut album, RAZA Kapelya, which was recorded and released with Rising Song Records this past winter. In her music and song circles, as well as in her day-to-day experience, Chana strives to hold a space with others recovering from illness or traumatic injury, through the healing powers of quiet, laughter, humming, singing and movement.