State of Israel (1948–) Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila“ (1918)

Official Discord server: (Info) Song in Hebrew and Polish “Hava Nagila is one of the first modern Israeli folk songs in the Hebrew language. It went on to become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings and bar/bat(b’nei) mitzvah celebrations. The melody is based on a Hassidic Nigun. It was composed in 1918, to celebrate the Balfour Declaration and the British victory over the Ottomans in 1917. It was first performed in a mixed choir concert in Jerusalem. Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (1882–1938), a professor at Hebrew University, began cataloging all known Jewish music and teaching classes in musical composition; one of his students was a promising cantorial student, Moshe Nathanson, who with the rest of his class was presented by the professor with a 19th-century, slow, melodious, chant (niggun or nigun) and assigned to add rhythm and words to fashion a modern Hebrew song. There are competing claims regarding Hava Nagila’s composer, with both Idelsohn and Nathanson being sugg