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TEL AVIV \u2014 A raucous crowd of football fans filled the narrow strip of grass between Tel Aviv\u2019s music center and Bloomfield Stadium, home to the Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer teams. Threading their way through them toward the concert hall was an incongruous procession of young musicians in eveningwear, lugging cases of every shape and size for contrabasses, violins, ouds, cellos and darbukas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Inside the concert hall, a small audience of friends, siblings, parents and music lovers let out a swell of whoops and claps more in keeping with a soccer game than the polite demeanor usually reserved for orchestras.<\/span><\/p>\n The concert was the public culmination of a youth project composed of Jewish and Arab performers run by the Jerusalem Orchestra East & West, known as TJO, the Israeli orchestra led by conductor Tom Cohen that blends Western orchestral music with Middle Eastern, North African and Andalusian traditions. TJO has shared the stage with major Israeli artists including Matti Caspi, Danny Sanderson and Ehud Banai, and is due to perform at the Concordia Summit in New York in September.<\/span><\/p>\n The program brings youth orchestras from across the country under TJO\u2019s guidance, training young musicians to carry forward the musical language Cohen has spent years developing. He describes that language as part of an evolving \u201cIsraeli sound,\u201d made up of \u201ceverything that began with our grandparents in the various diasporas around the world and arrived with them here in waves of immigration.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It grew out of his own journey from Western classical music into the music of the Maghreb and the Middle East, and \u201cbrings together elements from East and West without losing the identity and distinctiveness of either one,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re creating something new that is greater than the sum of its parts,\u201d Cohen said. Still, he was careful to add that the sound was not his orchestra\u2019s invention, but part of \u201can evolution, not a revolution that erases what came before it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Last week\u2019s concert brought together 80 musicians, ages 9 to 20, from half a dozen youth orchestras around the country, with some ensembles numbering in the dozens and others only a handful. Cohen said the project is meant to train a next generation of musicians who could one day join TJO, named the country\u2019s leading orchestra by the Culture Ministry in 2022, while also sending them out as \u201cambassadors of its language\u201d in their own work.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThroughout the process, we placed special emphasis on artistic excellence, direct professional encounters and a connection to the adult orchestra as a mentoring body that sets the path,\u201d he said of the youth project.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ensemble Sdot, a nine-member group from the Sdot Negev Regional Council in southern Israel whose players mostly wore kippot, took the stage first to perform a reworked song by the late Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Banai. In the audience, waiting for his own performance, Youssef Sarhan, a 9-year-old violinist from Majd al-Krum, an Arab town in northern Israel, bobbed his head along from his seat. He had begun studying a year and a half earlier with Fadel Maana, a veteran violinist in the Arabic tradition from the same town and one of TJO\u2019s senior musicians, who later brought him into the youth orchestra.<\/span><\/p>\n Addressing the young musicians from the stage, Cohen said he usually resists the familiar exercise of identifying who came from which community.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis nonsense of saying who\u2019s from where, it\u2019s so unnecessary,\u201d he said. But the mix was part of what made the music work, he told them, with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze youth \u201cbackstage trading information about Umm Kulthum,\u201d the revered Egyptian singer; maqams, the melodic modes used in Arabic and other Middle Eastern music; and other musical references.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cEven if you\u2019ve never spoken to each other in your lives, when two children sit together on stage, catch each other\u2019s eyes while they\u2019re playing and creating something together, the connection that\u2019s forged there is as deep as family,\u201d Cohen told them.<\/span><\/p>\n Cohen, who lives with his family in Brussels, said the years of war had changed his relationship with his work, which had always been his greatest source of joy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a feeling I can\u2019t describe, a feeling of being outside of time,\u201d he said by telephone after the concert. \u201cBut the last three years took that away from me.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As an Israeli conductor who plays Arabic music, Cohen said, his international career went quiet amid growing hostility toward Israel abroad, while in Israel it became harder to enjoy performing when, as he put it, \u201chalf an hour away, the world is falling apart.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The youth project offered a way back. Cohen said he found comfort in the connection between musicians \u201cwho come from completely different religions, backgrounds and places,\u201d and came to see the orchestra as \u201ca symbol of real hope, not just a professional artistic institution.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tom Cohen conducts the youth project of The Jerusalem Orchestra East & West. (Deborah Danan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Malak Aboufdaly, a teenage bassoon player from Acre, said that after years of war, she felt a responsibility to give the audience a measure of relief.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s my job to make you feel how I play. Sad or happy,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I think it\u2019s really important that we can make people happy after two or three years of war.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Outside the concert hall, 17-year-old Shoval Hayak, wearing a black evening gown, was being scolded to go back inside. She was excitable and effusive, not long removed from being a regular high school student in Moshav Hosen, near Israel\u2019s northern border. After Oct. 7, her family was evacuated to Tel Aviv, where she threw herself into singing. She joined the youth orchestra framework and later performed with the Israeli hip-hop and funk band Hadag Nahash.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At the concert, she was preparing to sing \u201cHallelujah\u201d with Nihaya Safadi, a singer and viola player also from Acre, in an arrangement Cohen wrote during the orchestra\u2019s first summer seminar.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t believe I could ever be a singer,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some of her peers, she said, tried to escape the reality of war and displacement through recreational drugs. Hayak found her escape in music.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI gave my heart and soul to this project. I got sucked into it more and more,\u201d she said. \u201cI truly believe that if I give my whole heart, all the small details that make everything shine come to the surface. Each time I go on, there are tiny improvements that I\u2019m not even aware of at the time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n She spoke quickly and warmly about the people around her: her mother, who she called \u201cmy support system\u201d; Cohen, who she said had become like a father to her; and her boyfriend Yair, who could not attend because he was observing the Omer, the traditional mourning period between Passover and Shavuot when many observant Jews avoid live music. \u201cBless his soul, I adore him,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n The same affection extended to the other young musicians she performed with. \u201cThey\u2019re the best family I could ever ask for,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n Cohen said watching young musicians like Hayak \u201cbecome professional and be captivated by the magic of music\u201d is part of what kept him invested in the project, which he took on as a volunteer effort. The next step, he said, is to give the program a larger stage and bring in more students.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The adult orchestra returned to the same East-West language last week in a concert about mixed identity at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, with additional performances scheduled elsewhere. The program centered on \u201cmatrouz,\u201d Arabic for \u201cinterweaving,\u201d a Judeo-Arabic tradition of placing Hebrew lyrics over Arabic melodies billed by the orchestra as the \u201coriginal Jewish mash-up.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Its pre-recorded guests included Dana International, the Israeli pop star who became the first transgender singer to win Eurovision in 1998, and Yousef Sweid, the Arab Israeli actor \u2013 performers who mirror the orchestra\u2019s interest in what it calls \u201cboth\/and\u201d identities that can be Arab and Jewish, left-wing and right-wing, religious and secular.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The youth evening ended with all the young musicians together playing \u201cFatouma,\u201d a Lebanese piece arranged and led by Cohen, who bounced on the balls of his feet, twirled on stage and flashed theatrical expressions at the players as he conducted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI was looking for a way back to my happiness and I found it in this world of children,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I\u2019m with them and making music, I go back to real, deep joy. Like a child.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Reporting the stories that define our era.<\/strong> When history unfolds in real-time, the Jewish world turns to JTA. Your support ensures we can document the complexities of war and the resilience of Jewish communities with integrity.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n