Culture jewish sessions

Last Tuesday, September 18, in the framework of the Jewish Culture Conference, our friend Neil (Manel) Frau-Cortès issued an interesting conference under the title: 'The diaspora of the Jewish Jewish liturgy. Towards the reconstruction of the Catalan Nusakhist '. Neil is Hazan and currently resides in Philadelphia, United States, and was one of the founders of ATID. The talk, deep, documented and at the same time very entertaining, revolved around two axes: on the one hand, the search for a historical nusakh (= version), that is, how the melodies and texts of the Catalan Jews were before of the fateful year 1391, in which most of the Catalan calls were destroyed, and, on the other hand, the current option of adapting liturgical texts to Catalan melodies, even current ones, that is to say, the creation of a New Nusakh as they have (and do) other Jewish communities in the world, thus giving, from the sources and the innovation, a new Catalan Nusakh. The conference concluded with the interpretation by Hazan (accompanied by a guitar and sometimes also by the public) of a series of sung prayers, either trying to reconstruct the medieval historical versions, or by opting for innovative versions, based on Catalan songs, even of the present time.