Daniel Zekhry
Dani Zekhry spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about what happens when Jewish texts stop sitting silently and obscurely on the page and begin to come alive—when they are sung, understood, questioned, and reinterpreted in conversation with the contemporary world.
Born into a Hebrew-speaking Mizrahi Jewish family in Brazil, he has spent a good part of his life serving Jewish communities there—as Madrich, Chazan, teacher of Jewish music, Hebrew, liturgy, cantillation, and B’nei Mitzvah, Torah reader, and educational and religious coordinator. He even worked as a security agent for EL AL during the years when the airline flew to São Paulo. Now a second-year rabbinical student at the Abraham Geiger Kolleg, he is bringing that long-standing commitment into a broader international setting, including service in Germany and in Vilnius, where he has worked as Chazan, Torah reader, teacher of cantillation, and as a rabbinical student serving in a rabbinic capacity.
His work is shaped by a commitment to Jewish learning, spiritual leadership, interreligious dialogue, a deep belief in the equal dignity of all human beings, and to making inherited liturgy audible, meaningful, and alive across languages, generations, and communal settings.
Sessions
Come join musical rabbinical students from Abraham Geiger Kolleg as we greet Shabbat. Like the psalmist writes, we will praise the Eternal with harp and lyre (and perhaps djembe and keyboard), joining with all that have breath. The service directions and drasha will be in English, but the the spirit of the service will be universal. We will be leading from the Nachama/Sievers "Tefillah L'Chol HaShana" but please bring your own siddur of any kind.
Can a collection of psalms function as a remedy? Jewish tradition has often treated the Psalms not only as prayer or poetry, but as spiritually potent forms of speech with distinct uses and effects. This session explores Tikkun HaKlali, the famous sequence of ten psalms presented by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov as a “general remedy” for inner impurity and spiritual brokenness, and asks how such an idea emerged, what it meant in its original setting, and how it continues to resonate through text, ritual voice, and melody.