We thought we’d seen it all when we posted videos of Hava Nagila on a Thailand TV show and Abanibi on a Spanish TV show.
But this week we came across a video of the Yiddish song Der Rebbe Elimelech performed on the Mongolian TV show Universe Best Songs, a local take-off of American Idol.
As reported in the Forverts, the Yiddish language edition of the Jewish Daily Forward, the singer is Amalia Rubin, an English teacher who lives in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar and specializes in the music of Mongolia and Tibet. She also performs in Hindi, Thai, Ladino, Hebrew, and Chinese.
Der Rebbe Elimelech was written in 1927 by Moshe Nadir. It’s a Yiddish version of the traditional English song Old King Cole that describes how the Rebbe Elimelech becomes merrier and wilder the more he drinks and ends up confusing the fiddlers, drummers, and cymbal players.
Enjoy!