Neta Elkayam discovered tape recordings from the Camp du Grand Arénas, a French transit camp, which she considered a significant find. The recordings were made by Moroccan Jewish folklorist Prof. Yissakhar Ben-Amir, who interviewed people migrating from Morocco to Israel in the 1950s and 60s. “I keep reliving this crisis of my community, when they were leaving the homeland and chasing this biblical dream,” Elkayam said. “He caught them in a moment when they were super fragile, especially the women who could not write and read.”
From these recordings, which she described as containing “the hums and mutterings of immigrant women, and melodies interrupted by a baby’s cry, an embarrassed laugh, the clatter of pots… a trembling sentence and the voice of a woman,” Elkayam observed how Moroccan Jewish women expressed their faith through lyrics and improvisation. “All of a sudden I also remembered my grandmother putting me to sleep like that. The tunes felt familiar, I felt it tickling my DNA,” she said. “I realized that there is a language here. The women were a community gathering around these songs.”
The recordings helped her imagine her grandmother’s culture and life in Morocco, which her grandmother rarely described. “I was always fascinated, because I felt the gap between my grandmother’s house and society outside,” she said. “My grandmother is the only reason I believe in God.”
At a time when she was reconsidering her artistic direction, the tapes inspired her latest album, Arénas, created with her husband Amit Hai Cohen. The album reimagines Moroccan Jewish music, centering her voice as an extension of the women’s voices of her ancestors. Cohen blends tradition with synths, sampling, beats with bendirs, and New Orleans-influenced horns. Half of the album is original, the other half is based on scattered lyrics and tunes Elkayam could make out in the recordings. “When I caught a line, I tried my best to shape it in a way that is reasonable for today, but still keeps the same essence of the past,” she said.
Track three, “Hawa Hawa,” is inspired by a word Elkayam repeatedly heard in the recordings. “When the musicologist asked the woman ‘what is Hawa?’ she said ‘if you won’t sing it, what else would you sing?’ It doesn’t mean anything, it helps you process and fills the void between sentences.” The word Hawa was sung collectively in a call and response style, echoed in Elkayam’s song. To her, it felt like finding her ancestors’ blues. “They used it to support each other while working,” she said. “Music served life and not the other way around. In the western world, we almost make art and music holy. But for them, life came first and music was there to heal and help process loss.”
The album’s New Orleans influences came naturally as the city’s music holds a similar space of resilience and reclaiming one’s roots. “We have so much common ground with the birthplace of jazz and blues and much of the lyrics which describe daily life,” Elkayam said.
Track two, “A Lalla Ya Ima,” is inspired by Tahdid singing, which refers to the traditional sword and protection rituals performed by Jewish communities in Morocco. It originally praised a heroic groom arriving on a horse, but Elkayam turned it around and praised a heroic woman and her beauty instead. “In the end, she doesn’t need anyone,” she said with a laugh. “I adapted it to my own life and I wanted to imagine how these songs would sound if they were written now. If there wasn’t this historical tragedy through which I lost 1000 years of culture.”
The Tamazight language was the first thing Elkayam’s community lost upon migrating to Israel. They adopted Dajira to communicate with other North Africans; Elkayam learned it when reconnecting with her roots. “I remember really falling in love with the language and the adults didn’t understand why. They’d say ‘we moved on, it’s a new country, stop emphasizing the differences, adopt the mainstream’”, she recalled. “I refused, I was a big believer in the mother tongue. I wanted to communicate with my grandmother and the stories she’d brought with her.”
When Elkayam speaks to Moroccans, they sometimes note with curiosity that she sounds like their grandmother. “The Jews took some of this language with them and wouldn’t let it go,” she said. “When I write songs in Darija, I don’t want to totally adapt and pretend I was born there. I want to be honest and create in a way that reflects my identity and my roots.”
Echoing other diasporic Moroccans, Elkayam said that her Moroccan-ness is never questioned, even though people realize there is a story behind her accent. “Moroccan Jews and Muslims had an inter-faith connection like no other in the Jewish diaspora,” she said. “It goes back to Andalusia and Amazigh culture, so Moroccans still have that muscle of practicing coexistence.”
Sonically, this connection is reflected in Jewish Moroccan music, which preserves some of the Andalusian music first co-created by the two communities. “I remember hearing this Andalusian music in the synagogue I grew up in,” Elkayam said. She heard it again in Morocco during Ramadan, suddenly feeling transported back to the synagogue.
Elkayam’s own music is inspired by Andalusian music, ancient Hebrew poetry found on Moroccan graves, and piyyutim, liturgical songs layered over Amazigh tunes.
