Last year, the artistic director of Caravan Orchestra and Choir, Polina Shepherd, introduced her new musical setting of Meyer Kharats’ Yiddish poem Mir farshidene, mir nemen zikh arum (We, who are different, embrace each other).

There could hardly be a more fitting motto for Caravan Orchestra & Choir. Recipient of the Shimon Peres Prize in 2018, it brings together young musicians with very different backgrounds from Germany and Israel for three weeks, during which they discover and come to value their many differences, as well as what they have in common.

Guided by internationally renowned musicians, the Caravan Orchestra & Choir dives into a centuries-old exchange among diverse musical cultures, including Yiddish, Sephardic, Arabic, Ottoman and Greco-Turkish instrumental and vocal music. Over three weeks of rehearsing and traveling together, the young musicians come to recognize these great traditions as a shared heritage and a living source of new musical creativity. 

With a different cast of young musicians and leaders each year, the Caravan Orchestra & Choir is always a new adventure, creating exuberant, passionate music that is new, fresh, and full of improvisation and pure joy. And, now more than ever, it proves that violence is not the only possible reaction to differences.