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Ishay Ribo, Orthodox singer who has drawn religious and secular fans, will be the first Israeli to headline Madison Square Garden
(JTA) — The Orthodox singer Ishay Ribo, whose music has attracted a diverse audience of religious and secular Israeli fans, will be the first musician from Israel to headline a concert at Madison Square Garden.
“I’ve been keeping this inside for a long time and more than once I pinched myself to check if I was dreaming or if this is real,” Ribo wrote on his Facebook page on Monday. “It seems that both answers are correct, thank God.”
At a time when Israeli society is deeply divided by political and religious fault lines, Ribo, 34, has achieved crossover appeal by blending religiously-themed lyrics with pop melodies, and is a leading voice in Israel’s “faithful pop” genre. One of his songs, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most-played song on the country’s radio stations in 2021, according to a recent New York Times profile.
Born in Marseille, France to parents from Algeria and Morocco, Ribo’s family moved to the Israeli West Bank settlement of Kfar Adumim when he was 8. He grew up in a haredi Orthodox family and was first exposed to secular music when it played over the speakers during bus rides to school.
Ribo self-released his first album in 2014, and four of his five albums have reached gold certification, each selling more than 15,000 copies in the Israeli music market. He has performed alongside popular Israeli musicians such as Shlomo Artzi and Idan Raichel, and has drawn some backlash from Orthodox Israelis.
The poster for Ribo’s show at the iconic 20,000-seat New York City venue, which is scheduled for September 3, highlights his religious identity. The concert is advertised with a photo of Ribo in silhouette, performing in front of a crowd full of flashing phone cameras. Block letters spell out his name in gold, above Hebrew text reading “Elul 5783,” — the month and year of the show on the Jewish calendar. One of the sponsors of the show is Bnei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth group.
Ribo is not the first Orthodox Jewish musician to have captured the attention of secular listeners. Other such performers include Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach — who blended liturgical lyrics with the sensibilities of the Greenwich Village folk scene and, later, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood — and the Miami Boys Choir, an American musical group founded in the 1970s that recently had a song go viral on TikTok.
Nor is Ribo the first Orthodox singer to plan a concert at Madison Square Garden. In 2008, a Hasidic charity concert was planned for the stadium, to be headlined by singer Lipa Schmeltzer, but Schmeltzer ultimately dropped out of the event after a group of 33 rabbis signed a decree saying the concert would cause “ribaldry and lightheadedness” and “strip the youth of every shred of fear of heaven and [lower] them into a pit of destruction.”
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The post Ishay Ribo, Orthodox singer who has drawn religious and secular fans, will be the first Israeli to headline Madison Square Garden appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Says ‘Clock Is Ticking’ for Iran
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened consequences for Iran if its leaders do not act quickly.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
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Netanyahu Warns Israel Prepared for ‘Any Scenario’ with Iran, Vows to Defeat Drone Threat in Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Speaking at a special government meeting marking Jerusalem Day at the Knesset Museum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces in Lebanon are holding and clearing territory while confronting a growing threat from fiber-optic FPV drones. He said he convened a special team with the defense minister and civilian and military experts, telling them they have “no budget limit” to find a solution. “Whatever it costs, it costs,” Netanyahu said, adding that he has “no doubt that Israel will be the first country to deliver a complete solution to this problem.”
Netanyahu also said he would speak with President Donald Trump to hear his impressions from his trip to China and discuss Iran and various regional scenarios. “There are certainly many possibilities; we are prepared for any scenario,” he said, adding that Israeli authorities remain vigilant regarding Iran.
Over the weekend, Israel eliminated Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom Netanyahu described as “number one in Hamas’s military wing” and a “master murderer,” responsible for the killing, injury, and kidnapping of thousands of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Netanyahu said Israel now controls 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and reiterated that the operation’s objective is to ensure Gaza will “never again pose a threat to Israel.” He added that Israel has fulfilled its promise to return all hostages, including “the hero of Israel, the late Ran Gvili.”
“Every single architect of the massacre and the hostage-taking will be eliminated down to the last one, and we are very close to completing this mission,” he said.
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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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