Hayom Yom Huledet: A Song History

← Back to Browse By Song

"Hayom Yom Huledet" ("Today is a birthday") is widely sung as an Israeli "folk" song whose makers few people know, but a 2018 article on the National Library of Israel's blog names both of them.[1] The words are by the Yiddish writer and translator Ben-Zion Raskin, who wrote them for his daughter Esther's fifth birthday and drowned off the Tel Aviv shore not long afterward.[1] The Israeli song archive Zemereshet dates the words to 1930 and credits the familiar melody to Varda Gilboa.[2]

Colorful monotype of children playing on a pebbly shore beside boats in a shipyard

Maurice Prendergast, Shipyard: Children Playing, color monotype, 1900–1902. Children at play, shown in fun; it has no connection to the song.

Gilboa, whose earlier publications credit her as Varda Karp, had come to Palestine alone at sixteen after her father's death and became a rhythmics teacher in kindergartens.[1] Her tune and Raskin's words seem to have reached print together in the early 1940s, in a booklet of her songs for kindergarten children.[1] Zemereshet points out that she was only sixteen when the words were written and reports a family account that the melody came some years later, though it notes that the basis for this is unclear; another tune may have been sung to the words at first.[2] Her son recalled that it hurt her not to be recognized as the composer of so widely sung a song, and a 1977 collection quoted in the article calls it the best known of her many songs sung by children.[1]

Recordings listed by Zemereshet include versions by Miriam Avigal (1957) and Yaffa Yarkoni (1958), and a 1962 recording by Tom Glazer sung in Hebrew and English.[2] Judy House includes it, as "The Birthday Song In Israel," in A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer, a book of Passover and Chanukah songs, Israeli folk songs, prayers, psalms and rounds arranged in DAD tuning.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Hayom Yom Huledet"

Sources

  1. National Library of Israel, The Librarians blog (Tamar Zigman): "Yom Huledet Sameach, Mar ve-Geveret Amami" (Happy Birthday, Mr. and Mrs. Folk).
  2. Zemereshet: "Hayom Yom Huledet".
  3. Judy House: "A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer".
  4. Image: Maurice Prendergast, Shipyard: Children Playing, color monotype, 1900–1902. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

← Back to Browse By Song