Sep 9, 2016

Two months ago, Moshe Choresh bought a new taxicab and fitted it with a sophisticated multimedia system. The expensive system is meant not only to make his long hours driving the roads of Israel more pleasant, but to broadcast a message that brings people together: beloved Israeli songs translated into Arabic, as sang beautifully by his wife, Sandra.

“I don’t see Arabs through a rifle sight,” Moshe says in an interview with Al-Monitor. “I’ve worked with them in the past and am familiar with Arab culture. I know they’re people like us.”

The first song he translated into Arabic was Zohar Argov's “A Sea of Tears,” which they recorded in their living room in Ramat Gan. They recorded the other songs in a professional recording studio, with rich musical adaptations played in the background. The masterpieces of Sandra and Moshe’s musical project are “Take Me Under Your Wing” by Israel's national poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and “A Delicate Hand” by famous 20th-century Hebrew/Yiddish poet Zalman Shneur. About 207,000 people have listened to some of the greatest examples of Israeli music in the Arabic language on the couple’s YouTube channel.

Moshe was born in 1957 in Israel to parents who emigrated from Iraq. After his discharge from the Israel Defense Forces, he started university studies but had to leave school when his father’s business selling spices and dried fruits at the Levinsky wholesale market in Tel Aviv began to struggle. At the market, Choresh's Arabic became fluent as he worked alongside Arabs in the family business. “The Abu al-Ayish family from Gaza [the Palestinian doctor who lost three daughters in an airstrike on his home during Operation Cast Lead in 2009] worked with us. They spoke Arabic to me from morning to night. That’s how I learned to speak with the right accent and pronunciation,” Moshe says.

Translating poems by Bialik and Shneur requires expert knowledge of Arabic, but Moshe doesn’t find it difficult. He says he has a remarkable ability to absorb languages, and he’s now learning Spanish and Russian. His English is that of a native speaker. “Words are my whole world,” Moshe says, noting that he has published two books of poetry and three historical novels — two in Hebrew and one in English. He’s now working on his fourth book, a historiographical novel about European Jewry.