Haim Moshe
is an Israeli singer whose musical style has crossed over from Yemenite and Mediterranean "ethnic" music to include mainstream Israeli and western pop elements. He has helped Mizrahi music

Mizrahi music

Mizrahi music refers to the music integration that combines elements from Europe, the West, and Middle Eastern/North African countries transported to Israel by migrating Jews. It is usually sung in Hebrew, literary Hebrew and Arabic slang...

 achieve wide popularity
both in Israel
and in Arab countries.

Biography

Haim Moshe was born in 1956 in Ramat HaSharon

Ramat Hasharon

Ramat HaSharon is a city located on Israel's central coastal strip in the south of the Sharon region, bordering Tel Aviv to the south and Herzliya and Kibbutz Glil Yam to the north. It is part of the Tel Aviv District, within Gush Dan metropolitan area...

, Israel. His parents were Yemenite Jews who immigrated to Israel after World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

; as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews they had a distinct culture and background from the Ashkenazi (European) Jews who played the major role in establishing the modern state and culture of Israel. As a child he learned to sing not only Israeli and Jewish religious music in the synagogue, but also Greek, Turkish, and Arabic songs, which he performed for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. As a young man, Moshe worked in a print shop, and he served in the Israeli military in the mid-1970s.

Musical career

Moshe began his professional music career as a member of the band "Sounds of the Vineyard" along with Daklon

Daklon

Daklon is the nickname of an Israeli musical artist Yosef Levy. He was born in 1944 in Tel Aviv's Kerem Hateimanim neighborhood, as a son of Jewish-Yemeni immigrants from the Shar'ab region in Yemen....

 and Moshe Ben-Mosh, playing in clubs and at weddings. Their music was distributed by the brothers Asher and Meir Reuveni, who had started informally selling cassette-tape recordings of wedding performances by Daklon and others. This Mediterranean or Oriental style, which had been neglected by the established Israeli music industry, became known as "cassette tape music" or "central bus station music" (after the stalls in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station

Tel Aviv Central Bus Station

Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, known as the New Central Bus Station , is the main bus station of Tel Aviv, Israel...

 where many of the tapes were sold). Many of the songs were taken from Greek and Turkish pop, with the words translated or entirely rewritten in Hebrew by specialist lyricists, and the music reworked into Yemeni style. Mediterranean music grew in popularity after 1980 and eventually became a profitable business for the Reuveni brothers.

In 1983 Haim Moshe released his first major album, "Ahavat Hayay (Love of My Life)," with 200,000 sales. This album included two hit songs: "Ahavat Hayay," a Yemenite-style song in Hebrew; and "Linda," a Lebanese song which Moshe
sang in Arabic.
"Linda" was not an immediate hit on Israeli radio, but earned Moshe a following among Palestinians and Arabs from
surrounding countries.
The success of this album made Haim Moshe a "household word" in Israel.

From the mid-1980s, Moshe began to incorporate more "Shirei Eretz Yisrael" into his repertoire. These "songs of the Land of Israel

Music of Israel

The music of Israel is a combination of Jewish and non-Jewish music traditions that have come together over the course of a century to create a distinctive musical culture. For more than 100 years, musicians have sought original stylistic elements that would define the emerging national spirit...

" formed a corpus of standard Israeli songs, many with patriotic themes, developed to promote an Israeli national identity. This helped Moshe achieve greater mainstream popularity in Israel, but also attracted criticism that he was abandoning his Mizrahi musical and cultural roots in a process of "Ashkenazification."

"My friends say to me: 'Haim, you're exaggerating. You're running out on us. You will soon be an Ashkenazi. Just when we have found a good singer in our style, you turn to another style.' They want me with them, to keep the style for them, to keep up the standards. So that musica mizrahit will receive the honour it deserves. My roots are black, real black… I am and will always be Haim Moshe with the Yemenite accent, the jargon and the admirationfor the Oriental culture."

Over the following decades, he released a string of hit albums, among them
"Ten Laz'man Lelehet" (Let Time Pass),.
His performance of the song "Pictures in an Album," composed by Ze'ev Nehama and Tamir Kaliski, was the 1999 Golden Feather Awards
Song of the Year.
His most recent album is "Karov LeLev (Close to the Heart)," released in 2008.

Cultural influence

Haim Moshe's music became popular not only with Israelis, but also with Arabs in surrounding countries. He began to receive fan mail from young people in Syria and throughout the region, and it was even rumored that during the 1982 Lebanon War

1982 Lebanon War

The 1982 Lebanon War , , called Operation Peace for Galilee by Israel, and later known in Israel as the Lebanon War and First Lebanon War, began on 6 June 1982, when the Israel Defense Forces invaded southern Lebanon...

, the Israeli and Syrian armies were both
listening to his "Linda."
He became a positive symbol Israel
within the Arab world,
and of Mizrahi culture within Israel. He has been "a bridge between East and West in Israel", predicting that "In another twenty years this music will be known as the real Israeli music - not eastern or western but the authentic sound."

Discography

Moshe has released 35 albums, not including collections. Some of the best known are:

• Ahavat Hayay, 1983 (Love of My Life)
• Hakolot shel Pireus, 1990 (Voices of Piraeus
  Piraeus
  Piraeus is a city in the region of Attica, Greece. Piraeus is located within the Athens Urban Area, 12 km southwest from its city center , and lies along the east coast of the Saronic Gulf....
  
  )
• Etmol, 1995 (Yesterday)
• Hatmonot SheBa'albom, 1998 (Pictures in an Album)
• Od Shana Chalfa, 2000 (Another Year Has Passed)
• Emtza Hachayim, 2001 (In the Middle of Life)

Grenade attack

On February 8, 2010, an explosive device was thrown at his Ramat Hasharon home. There were no reports of injuries or damage.