Washington Jewish Week: Northeast Hillels A Cappella Competition Gives Students a — Musical — Voice
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the Washington Jewish Week on March 5, 2025, under the title “Jewish Joy in the House: Northeast Hillels A Cappella Competition Gives Students a — Musical — Voice.”
When Jewish college students from six campuses throughout the Northeast United States came together this past weekend on University of Maryland’s College Park campus, they filled their day and evening with song. The gathering of nearly 70 students from Tufts, Harvard, Brandeis, Yale and Maryland universities, along with professional singers from Queens College in New York, was part of a new initiative from Hillel International, which serves Jewish students on 850 campuses around the world.
Hillel’s latest initiative is, simply put, “to spark joy,” according to Michael Kagan, Hillel’s director of student engagement and experiences. He was at The Clarice, University of Maryland’s performing arts center, on March 1 to support the Northeast Hillels A Cappella Competition in a sing-off between the six selected college’s Jewish a cappella groups, each vying for best in show.
Excitement was high Saturday night at the end of Shabbat as students from the six groups straightened their matching ties and hairbows, warmed up their voices and went through a brief technical rehearsal on the Gildenhorn Recital Hall.
Mayta Cohen, the Boston-based vocal arranger, song leader, composer and vocalist, urged the 250 audience members to hum, sing, clap and stomp, making their own beautiful noise in between each group performance and while judges deliberated. In her long, flowy skirt her effervescent energy and love of song kept the show running and the audience primed for each new entry.
Collegiate a cappella groups date back more than a century to Ivy League schools like Yale’s famous Whiffenpoofs — and other early supporters of then-all-male singing groups like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Northwestern University. Yet it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Jewish students began forming their own performing song groups without instrumentation.
Olivia La Fiandra, a UMCP senior from Baltimore, is in her third year singing with her group Kol Sasson where she values the friendships she has forged and the break it gives her in a heavy class and study schedule. “I really love to sing,” she said, shortly after Kol Sasson’s warm-up rehearsal. “I like being in a Jewish community that brings us together for more than just being Jewish,” she said. “We all love to sing and we do it five hours a week.” Kol Sasson, which was founded in 1997, performs throughout the Washington, D.C., region at synagogues and Jewish organizations, often over Shabbat — Friday night and Saturday. La Fiandra added how much she enjoys when the group performs Sunday mornings for local Hebrew schools.
She noted that while the evening is a competition, more importantly, she pointed out, “This is an event for the Jewish community: bringing people together through Jewish music. I feel that there’s a real connection you get when you can connect through song.”
The songs during the evening ranged from a Yiddish-American classic — “Shey Vi Di Levune” by the Barry Sisters — to an Israeli classic by the country’s renowned singer/songwriter Naomi Shemer — “Lo Tenatzchu Oti” — to acclaimed world-music composer Idan Raichel’s love song “Millim Yafot Me’eleh.” Then there were pop songs reimagined as a cappella, like “Block” by Anna Zak and “Kupidon” by Agam Buhbut, a play on Cupid in a love song.
Prizes were awarded in six categories, including audience choice, voted on by attendees via a QR code in the program. Best vocal percussion, better known as beatboxing, which each group incorporated in their arrangements, went to Natan Golding of Tufts’ Shir Appeal. Shlomi Helfgot received best male soloist for his work with Yale’s Magavet, one of the nation’s oldest Jewish a cappella groups, founded in 1993. University of Maryland’s Rak Shalom singers Jamie Eisner and Liv Herman shared the award for best female soloist.
Perhaps in a home-turf advantage, Rak Shalom took the rest of the awards: audience choice, best arrangements and overall first place, which included a $1,000 prize for the group.
Among the judges, which included music industry pros such as conductor and arranger Daniel Henkin, Jewish vocalist Nathaniel Ribner, and Broadway performer Natalie Weiss, Hillel President and CEO Adam Lehman seemed an unlikely music expert.
“I’ve been singing a cappella since I was in college,” he said when asked about his credentials to judge an a cappella competition. “I was one of the early members of the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics, the first coed a cappella group at Dartmouth College. Then there were no Jewish a cappella groups at Dartmouth … or other places.” And, for the past 13 years, Lehman has been singing with a local Jewish a cappella group in the Washington, D.C., area.
He noted that this Jewish a cappella competition is right on message for Hillel International. “It’s critical to create opportunities for Jewish joy for Jewish students on campus,” Lehman said. “We all know the challenges of these past 16 or 17 months and those challenges have not fully disappeared, but one of the most important things we can do as Hillel is to create these opportunities for Jewish students to come together in areas of passion for them to celebrate being part of a vibrant Jewish community.”
The competition served as a prototype, according to Lehman, which Hillel International hopes to expand across North America and globally in the coming year. He envisions regional competitions building to an international sing-off among the best of the best Jewish student a cappella groups.
UMCP junior Tekoa Sultan-Reisler, Kol Sasson’s president, said singing together with a group of people is a spiritual experience for her, and has been since her days as a student at Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy in Rockville, where she sang with the school’s high school Matanotes.
Sultan-Reisler continues singing and building Jewish connections throughout the northeast U.S. through music. But, now more than ever, her work with Rak Shalom has taken on greater purpose. “The Jewish community is obviously in crisis and it’s so much more important to bring more people together,” the Silver Spring native said. “I think people have the impulse to push others away if they find there’s tension based on what’s going on [in the world]. The impulse is to isolate.”
“We have to do just the opposite,” Sultan-Reisler said, “by bringing more people together and finding common ground and things we can sing about together right now.”
Lisa Traiger is Washington Jewish Week’s arts correspondent.