We’re excited to welcome Aviva Chernick to Beth Tzedec as our inaugural Artist in Residence. The award-winning singer has brought her voice in music and prayer to communities and congregations around the globe, and she’s now adding her voice to ours under the banner of the Beth Tzedec Centre for Spiritual Well-Being.

As Artist in Residence, Aviva will model and teach Jewish values and culture and be personally engaged with the larger community through musical expression and leadership. She will lead programs related to mindfulness and spirituality for our members and offer mentorship to our spiritual leaders to nurture their spiritual practice. Her residency will run from November 2019 to May 2020.

Singing in Hebrew, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Yiddish and English, she has had the pleasure of making music with many wonderful musicians including Frank London, Yair Dalal, Jackie Richardson and Flory Jagoda. Aviva’s collaborative recordings have garnered several nominations and awards, including Juno nominations for Jaffa Road’s albums Sun Place (2010) and Where The Light Gets In (2013), a Canadian Folk Music Awardfor Where The Light Gets In(2013), a Canadian Folk Music Award Nomination for When I Arrived You Were Already There(2012)as well as for Under the Canopy (2008). Aviva and her co-writers from Jaffa Road won the John Lennon International Songwriting Grand Prize for their rendition of “Lo Yisa Goy”, a prayer for peace.

For the past fourteen years, alongside an active performing and touring career, Aviva has served in and around Toronto and as a guest in communities across North America leading and teaching about the voice in prayer and about contemplative practice. She completed her training as a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and continues to teach a program on niggun and the voice in prayer that she co-designed with Rabbi Sam Feinsmith for the Institute online. In 2018, Aviva was one of 18 Jewish Prayer Leaders chosen to participate in the first Hadar Rising Song Fellowship in Philadelphia and this December, she returns on faculty to the Hadar Singing Communities Intensive to offer their very first Vocal study track.

Aviva is the founder of the sitting and singing community neySHEV, and she facilitates workshops in freeing the voice and practices of Mindfulness in Song and Silence at home in Toronto and with diverse communities while on her many travels. 

Learn more about Aviva Chernick, her practice and her role at Beth Tzedec in the upcoming Beth Tzedec Bulletin, which will arrive in homes in January 2020.