“Shlock Rock was never supposed to be my career,” Lenny Solomon, 64, lead singer of the Jewish-Israeli-American band Shlock Rock, told Davar from his home in Beit Shemesh. On one of the wide walls of his home studio hang the 42 albums he’s released over more than four decades of Jewish rock and roll—a career that includes some 2,000 live shows. A new documentary about him, The King of Shlock, is set to screen this year at the Docaviv documentary film festival in Tel Aviv.
Solomon isn’t widely known in the mainstream, but in modern Orthodox communities in the US and Israel, his music is part of the soundtrack many grew up with—from family road trips to summer camps. Even now, he still fills concert halls. “Who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Jewish music?” asks Jewish rapper Etan G. in the film. “There’s only one answer: Mordechai Ben David, Avraham Fried, Shlomo Carlebach, and Lenny Solomon. There are a lot of great artists, but no one has influenced the Jewish people more than Carlebach and Lenny Solomon. And I don’t think Lenny has gotten the credit he deserves.”
Born in 1961 to a religious family in Queens, New York, Solomon studied accounting and worked in the field for several years until his band began to take off. “I actually started out playing accordion, but people made fun of it, so I switched to keyboard,” he said “I just wanted to be a rocker.”
He began his music career in a Hasidic wedding band called Kesher. “It was more my friend Zvi Pill’s thing,” he said. “But at some point I told Zvi I wanted to do rock and roll.”
In 1985, while still in Kesher, he released his first album, “Shlock Rock”—a Jewish rock record. “It really caught on,” he said.
Eventually, he left Kesher, since Pill wanted to play music for weddings and other Jewish celebrations and Solomon wanted to play rock. “He wasn’t happy about it,” Solomon recounted. “We split up. I had to do it.”
From 1998 to 1996, the band—Solomon, Yonah Lloyd, who had played with him in Kesher, as guitarist, Gary Wallin on drums, Mark Skier on bass, Danny Block on saxophone, and Mark Infield on percussion—played at least 100 shows a year.”
In Yiddish, the word “schlock” means cheap or inferior and is often used to refer to secondhand goods. At the beginning of Shlock Rock’s career, the band mostly dealt with making the old new again by “Judaizing” popular secular songs.
Eventually, original songs gained more space on their albums—children’s songs, humorous musicals, parodies, and deeply personal tracks.
In 1992, Solomon met his wife in Israel. By 1996, he’d made aliyah and settled in Beit Shemesh. One of his earliest Israeli experiences was a missile alert during the Gulf War. “I had just arrived, and suddenly there was a siren. I had no idea what was happening—we ran into the sealed room,” he recalled. “I wrote a song about it, ‘Scenes from a sealed room,’ to give people in the Diaspora a sense of what life in Israel is like.”
Solomon and his wife have four daughters—three did national service and one served in the Israeli military. While the parents still speak English, the daughters are fully Israeli. They live in an English-speaking neighborhood where one synagogue brings together congregants with Moroccan and Polish surnames around Carlebach-style prayer, American Yiddishkeit, and English.
Despite the move, Solomon continued touring the US several times a year, especially during peak seasons like summer camp and Hanukkah vacation. On some tours, they played 16 shows in 19 days across multiple states. “We’re probably the only Jewish band that performed in all 50 US states,” he said. “It was exactly what I wanted. God set it all up.”
“Summer camps were amazing,” Solomon said, eyes lighting up. “Not just the religious ones, like Camp Monroe—we really connected with them. If you’re a rabbi and you want to reach a kid, what do you do? You give them a CD. Well, now there are no more CDs. But you play them Shlock Rock. That’s why our number one client was Chabad. By the end of our run, every show was basically a Chabad event.”
Shmuel Elmaleh, who directed The King of Shlock, grew up on Solomon’s music. In his Orthodox enclave of New York, secular music was taboo.
“I remember seeing Shlock Rock at Camp Lavi, where we went, and I was like ‘Wow!’ He was the coolest person I’d met by age six—playing keyboard with one hand, the other in the air, the whole crowd singing every word,” Elmaleh told Davar. “It was crazy. I still remember the ringing in my ears that night.”
He and Solomon now live in the same neighborhood, and he pitched the idea of a movie at synagogue on Shabbat after Solomon finished leading a service. “I think his personality surprises Israelis,” Elmaleh said. “Americans are more used to someone like him: creative, high-energy, very American.”
While working on the film, Elmaleh revisited old performances. “Years later, I watched the footage and thought—okay, here’s this dorky guy in shorts and knee-high socks, and everyone’s dancing and singing,” he said. “But that disconnect exists in the Modern Orthodox community. It intrigued me. Maybe it used to be cool and isn’t now—but he still draws 500 people to shows in Israel.”
Although the film had a full crew, most of the final cut was shot by Elmaleh himself.
“Maybe it helped that it was just the two of us most of the time,” Elmaleh said. “After one screening, an entirely secular actress came up and said it was moving, intelligent, and sensitive—and how Lenny opened up about his struggles resonated with her. That told me it touched others too—because alongside the humor and energy, Lenny was willing to share real, hard experiences.”
Elmaleh sees parallels between himself and Solomon—both left the US for Israel. “We’re two sides of the same coin,” he said. “Lenny had to give up a lot. He could’ve kept his fame going for years if he’d stayed in the US. But he seems happy here.”
For Solomon, his reason for making aliyah was simple. “You have to ask—why does anyone make aliyah? And the answer is: it’s in your soul. It’s in your gut. For me, there are six reasons I came,” he said, pointing to an album called “The Big 6.” “I’m very redemption-focused. I came to the Holy Land to see Elijah announce the Messiah, to see the Temple, the red heifer, the resurrection of the dead. Sure, I could’ve made more money in the US. But this is a mission—living a Jewish life is a mission. Music is my mission, to bring people joy.”
Elmaleh made aliyah seven years after Solomon.
“If I had stayed, I never would’ve become a filmmaker,” he said. “It’s nearly impossible for a religious Jew to work in that field over there—Shabbat, kashrut, and at the end of the day, it’s a Christian society. My mother gave up a lot. Every Independence Day I call her and say thank you for having the courage to leave it all and move to Israel.”
In its first 13 years, Shlock Rock released 20 albums that became staples in American Jewish households. Some listened to them on road trips or danced to them at parties. For others, the songs were amusing takes on mainstream rock-pop hits. And for many, the music offered a way to connect with Judaism in America.
“After my first album came out, I got a letter from a woman who wrote, ‘My brother hates Judaism, but he listens to your cassette around the clock. Keep up the good work,’” Solomon said. “It showed me this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I got a lot of encouraging letters, but also some saying things like, ‘If Abarbanel knew what you were doing with his name, he’d turn over in his grave,’” he laughs, referring to a humorous tribute song to the 15th-century biblical commentator Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, based on the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.”
Solomon’s goal is to bring people closer to God through his music and for his music to help hasten the arrival of the Messiah. “One of the hardest things is when someone says, ‘Judaism doesn’t speak to me.’ Then you tell yourself—if I don’t connect with them somehow, they’re lost. They won’t stay with us,” he said.
His career slowed down after music piracy took off and fewer people were buying his CDs.
“I still performed, but less, and sold fewer CDs,” he said. “I was doing more in Israel and the US. In the beginning, we also performed in Europe, South Africa, and Australia. But then things started to decline, and COVID came—and there just weren’t any shows.”
At a certain point in the conversation, Solomon’s accounting past came out. He opened an Excel spreadsheet listing every Shlock Rock performance since 1986, including the location, date, and audience size. The tally comes to 1,050 shows across the world and in Israel—from small gatherings in suburban Jewish communities to 25,000 people at the Maccabiah opening ceremony. According to Solomon, the real number is over 2,000, but not all were documented. In the 1980s and 1990s, they played hundreds of shows annually—mostly at summer camps—but over the years, community performances dwindled.
Just as his American career began to fade, Solomon found a place in Israeli music. He joined forces with Kobi Oz and Yermi Kaplan for a joint 2010 production of the song “Ani Yehudi” (I'm a Jew), alongside other Israeli artists from diverse diasporas. “The original version is from this album,” Solomon says, pointing to “Ten Lanu Siman” (Give Us a Sign), from 2004—the first of his albums to have a Hebrew title.
Early in their career, the popular a cappella group The Maccabeats approached Solomon to collaborate on a remake of his 1990 hit “Minyan Man.” The song is a metaphor for how rare it is to find a fellow Jew in some places. It tells the story of a man who arrives in a town with only nine Jews and decides to stay for Shabbat so they can form a minyan.
Solomon didn’t attend the screening of the documentary at Ma’aleh Film School’s graduation—its biggest event yet—because he was hospitalized for about three months with a health issue. Despite his absence, director Elmaleh made sure to record the moment the film won Best Short Film, as the crowd cheered: “Keep on Shlockin’!”
Since then, the man who once toured the US and fills halls in Israel has been recovering, still performing, and keeping his spirits high for future shows. He’s amazed that people are buying tickets to see the short film about his life.
The film King of Shlock will screen on May 22 at the Docaviv Festival in Tel Aviv.
