Fish Street Klezmer at Hemlock Farms

HEMLOCK FARMS — On Sunday, July 12 at 3 p.m., the Jewish Fellowship of Hemlock Farms is presenting the Fish Street Klezmer. This duet will feature the husband and wife duo of Cantor Ken Richmond and Rabbi Shira Shazeer. They will present an afternoon of klezmer music and songs that evoke eastern European Jewish life, culture and romance. Cantor Richmond is co-founder of the Yale Klezmer group. The event will take place at the Jewish Fellowship. Admission is $15 per person in advance and $18 per person at the door. For information call the Fellowship at 570-775-7497. Ken Richmond and Shira Shazeer have been performing klezmer music and Yiddish songs together for over a decade. They have performed hundreds of concerts around the U.S. and internationally, both in their duet Fish Street Klezmer and in their larger band the Klezmaniacs. The two have produced many CD’s, the lastest two of which are “Oy Vey, Rebenyu,” with the Klezmaniacs, and “Intoxicated: Yiddish Songs of Love and Drinking,” with Fish Street Klezmer. The band is named after Shira’s grandmother’s street in Poland. In the summer of 2000, the band accompanied Shira’s grandmother, Holocaust survivor Alta Frohman, as she returned to her home in Poland for the first time since World War II. Co-founder of the Yale Klezmer Band as an undergraduate and only the second cantorial student to be named a Wexner fellow, Ken Richmond is a graduate of the Miller Cantorial School of JTS, and serves Temple Israel of Natick, MA. Shira Shazeer is a rabbinical student at the Hebrew College in Newton, Mass. Ken and Shira have dedicated themselves to learning the Yiddish language, and they speak exclusively Yiddish with their two-year-old son Zalmen. Cantor Richmond got his start as an apprentice to Cantor Charles Osborne, and both he and Shira have sung in Cantor Osborne’s adult and youth choirs over the years.