After more than two decades of waiting in the shadows, an album created by R’ Gershon Beck of Oak Park, Michigan, is being released to the public. The album, a true labor of love and an absolute masterpiece, is a collection of beautiful and pure instrumental renditions of the Rebbe’s kappitelach niggunim, now finally brought to life for listeners everywhere.

Beck, who grew up in a kosher home in Long Island, had a childhood that he describes as “a rather misspent youth.” His family kept two sets of dishes and attended a Conservative synagogue, but the pull toward a more frum life began early, especially through his sister Malka. She left the public school system for HANC in Long Island, where her teacher, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Laine, “implanted in her something for the future.”

In 1977, when Beck was 18, the family moved to Phoenix. His parents chose a house near the shul, and the family began walking to davening. Beck and his older brother were slower to embrace the frum lifestyle, but the shift was inevitable.

By 1979, Rabbi Zalman Levertov sent Beck to Morristown. “My mother told me to make sure I take my clarinet. Boy, was she right,” he recalled. Morristown proved transformative.

Surrounded by teachers and peers who shared his interests and recognized his musical talent, Beck was given a couple of cassette tapes of Nichoach to listen to

“Soon enough, I became one of the students who would sing niggunim with the folks,” Beck tells Anash.org. “When there was some remodeling in the dormitory, we were all in one big room they called ‘the bowling alley.’ One night, my friend Dovid Zulauf told me I woke him up in the middle of the night singing niggunim!”

Looking back, Beck describes his time at Morristown as “a breath of fresh air after the misspent youth.” The guidance of teachers like Rabbi Avraham Lipskier, and the late Rabbis Fitzy Lipskier a”h and Dovid Wichnin a”h, was instrumental (excuse the pun). 

“Not sure where I’d be today if not for them,” Beck says. Rabbi Lipskier’s words still resonate with him to this day: “The Rebbe has a huge fishing rod bringing all his people back to their roots.”

Beck also participated in many of the Rebbe’s farbrengens. “On Shabbos, when the Rebbe would walk in majestically, the energy in the crowd as they sang the niggun of the Rebbe’s kappitel for the year was indescribable,” he remembered.

Music had always been a central part of his life, and he had long wanted to do something more with it. He even started a musical gemach in his hometown, including simple keyboards, flutes, and clarinets for bochurim to learn on.

About 20 years ago, in honor of the Rebbe’s birthday on Yud Alef Nissan, Beck worked with a fellow musician, Yisrael Lutnick of Yerushalayim, to produce an album featuring the Rebbe’s kappitelach niggunim, from Ovoi Begvuros (Kapitel 71) to Orech Yomim (Kapitel 92), as well as the melody “from 770 that were marching out.” 

“After I sent him the sheet music,” Beck recalls, “he wrote back, ‘This is really something special. Maybe I should join Chabad myself!’”

For whatever reason, the album wasn’t published, and it sat on Beck’s computer for years, shared only occasionally with friends. Finally, a short while ago, after a local friend heard the CD playing in Beck’s car and shared his delight, and with the encouragement of his wife, Naomi, the album is at last being released to the public.

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