Baruch Chait

Baruch Chait was born in 1946 in United States

Baruch Chait was born in the United States in 1946 to Esther and Rabbi Moshe Chait, who later headed Yeshivath Chafetz Chaim of Jerusalem. He studied at Yeshiva Chofetz Chaim in New York under Rabbi Henoch Leibowitz, who ordained him as a rabbi. As a youth counselor at summer camps in the Catskill Mountains, he learned to use music as a tool for education.

In 1967 he co-founded the band The Rabbis' Sons, whose first album included some of his early compositions. He later formed Kol Salonika, which mixed Hasidic songs with Greek musical motifs. He wrote the song Kol Ha'Olam Kulo while performing for IDF soldiers during the Yom Kippur War, and it was later covered by Ofra Haza.

He served as educational director of the Ohr Torah high school in Riverdale and moved to Israel with his family in the late 1970s. In the mid 1980s he founded Maarava in Matityahu, a Haredi yeshiva high school that combines religious and secular studies up to matriculation exams. He also wrote children's books on Jewish topics, illustrated by Gadi Pollack and Yoni Gerstein.

In 2022 he was inducted into the first class of the Jewish Music Hall of Fame. He is married to Paula, has 11 children and lives in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem.