Jewish music group Shlock Rock’s Lenny Solomon stepped off a plane in Mobile, Ala., on Monday, to perform in the city for the first time ever. In 1987, he released the song “Minyan Man,” which is set in the city.
“Of all the things left for Shlock Rock to do, this was one of them,” Solomon, who lives in Israel, told JNS. “I had played Birmingham. I had played Montgomery, but I had never played Mobile.”
The song, which found a cult following at Jewish summer camps in the 1990s, is told from the perspective of a Jew, who “stepped off the bus in Mobile, Ala.” when “Shabbos was an hour away.”
The man wanders the town, and finds a fellow Jew, who invites him to be the 10th man in a minyan.
Solomon told JNS that when he arrived in Mobile, he started crying, thinking of the song’s lyric, “When I make this trip through Mobile once every year, I remember the men who prayed here.”
Robin Meyerson, founder and director of the Shabbat Project Arizona and the Meis Mitzvah Project, which works to ensure Jews opt for burials instead of cremation, invited him.
Meyerson, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., told JNS that she was searching for her uncle, Donald, 90, because he “went off the grid, and the family lost touch with him.”
The family located him in a Jewish-owned nursing home in Mobile. “I told my kids where I found him, and my daughter-in-law starting singing ‘Minyan Man,’” she said.
“What are you singing?” Meyerson asked. Her daughter-in-law told her, “Well, we always used to sing this song in camp every Friday before Shabbat would come in.”
Meyerson was inspired to invite Solomon to come play for the residents of the nursing home. “His music touches the soul,” she told JNS.
On Monday, Solomon played for nearly two hours. “My uncle remembered all of the Jewish songs from when he was a little boy,” Meyerson said. “It all came back to him.”
She brought her uncle a kiddush cup and a tallit. Meyerson told JNS that after she located her uncle, she contacted a local Chabad rabbi, who began visiting him, bringing him challah and helping him put on tefillin.
“One of my first initial thoughts was that my uncle is 90-years-old. He needs a burial plan. So we put that in place immediately,” she said.
“One mitzvah ripples,” she told JNS. “I was trying to find my uncle, and now he’s reconnected with his family. He’s putting on tefillin. He’s saying prayers.”
