By Cindy Mindell ~

STAMFORD – Rabbi Elly Krimsky had been serving as spiritual leader of Young Israel of Stamford for about a year when the itch hit him: he missed playing keyboards in a band, a big part of his life since high school. The Brookline, Mass. native had formed the Barak Band in eleventh grade to play a Purim gig at the Talner Beis Medrash. He played keyboards in his NCSY chapter’s Segulah Orchestra and did the Washington, D.C. “simcha circuit” after graduating from Yeshiva University. But he stopped playing when he went back to Yeshiva for rabbinical school, and nearly a decade went by before Krimsky finally had a chance to get back to his music.

The Bass Din

In 2010, Krimsky posted an ad on the JewishStamford Yahoo! email group. He had already recruited two musicians from his congregation – Doni Perl on drums, and Warren “The Boy Wonder” Bein on trumpet.
Rabbi Yossi Pollak of Beit Chaverim in Westport responded. A rhythm guitarist and mandolin-player, Pollak serves with Krimsky on the Fairfield County Kashrut Committee.
“But keys, guitar, drums, and a horn weren’t yet a ‘band’ as I’d imagined it,” Krimsky says. “Enter the new Fairway Market in Stamford.”
Or, rather, as Krimsky tells it, “Rabbi Pollak and I entered the new store” during its November 2010 grand opening, “where Providence – through Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein of Manhattan – had placed Chabad Rabbi Chaim Zalman Levy to supervise kosher production,” Krimsky says.
In spite of the “din” at the event, the three rabbis discovered common ground, including their shared love of music. Krimsky told Levy of his idea to start a local band. A Westchester, N.Y. native, Levy joined as lead guitarist.
Levy had played violin and guitar since childhood, and was also a lifelong vocalist. He started his first rock band in third grade, and didn’t play seriously until he arrived at Harvard, where he helped form a rock band and played with a variety of fellow musicians throughout Boston and Cambridge. “It was a time that I really sensed that music – including my own – could be a key to opening doors on a positive new era in human history,” Levy says.
A long and winding road led Levy to Chabad Chasidism, and a professional writing career, then to rabbinic ordination and positions as rabbi and, most recently, kosher supervision at Fairway Market in Stamford.
“The music continues to develop,” says Levy, who is also involved in “funky Chassidic and other Jewish ‘roots’ music,” as well as two original rock projects aimed more squarely at the cultural mainstream.  “I’d like to think that I will be able to add my creative voice – in music, Torah, and writing – to the greater movement to bring a new Divine consciousness into the world around us,” he says.
Last fall, Krimsky found his third band-member. Dan Birenbaum has been playing clarinet, saxophone, and flute since his high-school days in New York City, when he was selected for the prestigious All City Symphony Band. He played the Washington Heights and Inwood, N.Y. synagogue circuit in a band with several friends, and performed with his parents and uncles at some of the last small Borscht Belt hotels.
Birenbaum started out at SUNY Binghamton as a music major. He spent his junior year at Tel Aviv University in 1970.
One year stretched to three, as Birenbaum played in nightclubs, for the Israeli Defense Forces, and with fellow American, Canadian, and South African students on the pirate radio station ship, “Voice of Peace.” Birenbaum eventually became an applications systems analyst, jamming with friends whenever he could. Over the last few years, he’s gotten back into music, playing with the Westchester Klezmer group, and with NatterJack Toad, a rock-’n’-roll band, and also doing some teaching.
Krimsky’s trio first set its sights on the annual Purim celebration at the Stamford JCC, organized by Young Israel of Stamford and Mount Kisco Hebrew Congregation, where Birenbaum is a congregant.
“The response from the crowd was enthusiastic, to say the least,” says Krimsky. “Everyone from toddlers to great-grandparents was up and dancing.”
The band-members began to think about a musical identity and a name. In the fall, they put together new material for Sukkot “Simchat Beit HaSho’eivah” shows in Stamford and Westport, and a bar-mitzvah party in Stamford. They were about to advertise a concert in honor of Shlomo Carlebach’s yahrzeit and a couple of Chanukah shows. Levy suggested a name. “I’d been saving it for a few years,” he says. “None of my other bands had ever used it.”
“The Bass Din” was born.
“Beis Din” – in Hebrew, literally, “house of judgment” – is the common term used for a rabbinic court, generally comprised of three Dayanim, or rabbinic judges. A longtime student of Jewish civil law and the bass guitar, Levy joked to the group, “What do you call three rabbis making a lot of noise? A ‘Bass Din,’ of course,” – a “house of noise.”
“The name is not merely a clever bi-lingual pun,” says Krimsky. He and Levy share a “chavruta,” a learning partnership focusing on the Laws of Judges (Hilchot Dayanim) in Choshen Mishpat, the section of the Code of Jewish Law that defines the court and Jewish civil law. And, when the band started out, three of its members were rabbis.
There has already been some turnover, as the demands of a musical life prove too difficult, and the Bass Din now features a core group of three: Dan Birenbaum on winds, Elly Krimsky on keyboard, and Chaim Zalman Levy on guitars.
The band – including original members and surprise guests – will headline the upcoming Congregation Agudath Sholom-Young Israel of Stamford joint Purim celebration on March 8 at the Stamford Plaza Hotel.
“With its diverse influences and personalities, the Bass Din has come to be an ‘Un-cover band,’” says Krimsky. “We eschew existing arrangements in favor of reconstructing the music from the ground up.” The band works to put its own mark on a wide variety of familiar Jewish music, Krimsky says, including Carlebach, contemporary rock, traditional simcha melodies, klezmer, Sephardic, and roots Chassidic compositions. The trio hopes to develop and record their original material.
“This is as much a spiritual goal as it is musical process,” says Levy. “Every time the band gets together to play, it is a chance to reveal the divine joy that is at the essence of every moment in every place.”
For more information on the Bass Din’s March 8 Purim performance call (203) 358-2200 or visit www.cas-stamford.org.