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Southfield resident Raquel Pomerantz Gershon knows that cutting
a CD requires pie?, of hard work and a lucky raffle ticket.
PHIL JACOBS EDITOR
IF
or Raquel Pomerantz Gershon, it
came down to a raffle, a little bit
of luck. She'll take it.
Her dream was to cut a CD, pro-
duce a record of songs she had writ-
ten and had been singing for years.
How many times had she heard oth-
ers stamp out their music by the thousands?
She knew she could be just as good, maybe
better.
The cost to produce a CD, though, was pro-
hibitive.
Then, last spring at the Hillel Day School
annual dinner, Gershon dropped a $200 check
in the school's raffle drawing. The result was
$18,000 in prize money, and she was on her way
to cutting Jerusalem On My Mind.
"I had 10 songs written," said Gershon, her
smile still intact with the memory of that night.
"I had enough songs to do an album. All I need-
ed was money. I was ready to beg or borrow. I
was praying for it to fall from the sky. It did."
The tape and CD, Jerusalem On My Mind, is
now available at Jewish bookstores throughout
metro Detroit. It is a sweet blend of the traditional
to the upbeat. One of Gershon's songs, "Kol Yis-
rael Arevim," was chosen as a finalist in the first
annual American Zionist Movement's Songwrit-
ing Competition.
Raquel Gershon, the wife of Shaarey Zedek's Rab-
bi William Gershon, has a father who is a rabbi and
a sister who is a cantor. Indeed, Ms. Gershon herself
is trained as a chazzan in the Conservative movement
and has conducted High Holiday services.
But there's more to this Southfield resident's taste
in music — a great deal more. She jokes that if one
were to analyze her music "personality," one would
most likely find everything from classical to rock
'n' roll with some folk thrown in there as well.
Her son Benji, 7, once told his Hillel classmates
that he felt his mom was "as famous as the Beat-
les."
Would the Beatles have had such a remarkable
family loud of Jewish song? Her dad, Rabbi Moshe
Pomerantz, constantly brought Jewish song into
their Seattle household. It was not unusual for
Raquel, her parents and three siblings to work
on harmonies and sing rounds. In recent years,
she and her family have put their family rounds
together in a recording studio. And the joke is, if
one wants to marry into the family, he or she
must audition. In the Pomerantz family, Friday
night Kiddush was always sung in six-part har-
mony.
Rabbi Pomerantz, a violinist, played in local
symphonies as a child and toyed with the idea
of becoming a professional musician. Alisa
Pomerantz-Boro, Raquel Gershon's younger
sister, is a cantor at Congregation Tiferes Is-
rael in San Diego. Her brother, Ari, works for
MTV's on-line department, and plays the gui-
tar and writes his own music. Brother Joey plays the
trumpet, and he's a chef. Her mom, Kay Pomerantz,
is a Jewish educator and an author. She's written
three cookbooks, Come For Cholent, Come For Cholent
ain' and Come For Everything But Cholent.
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