Originally from Portland, Maine, Gabriel Terracciano is an award-winning violinist and composer based in New York City. He holds undergraduate degrees from Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music, and a master’s from NYU. Gabe has spent his career focusing on playing the violin in a variety of non-classical genres, including jazz, bluegrass, western swing, rock, and hip hop, among others. He is a member of the two-time Grammy award winning Turtle Island String Quartet, The Avalon Jazz Band, The Hot Toddies, and many other New York-based projects. His first album of original music, “In Flight,” was released to critical acclaim in 2020, and his second album, “Three Part Invention,” will be released in April 2021.
Bill Nelson is a multi-talented musician who lives in New York.
D. Zisl Slepovitch is a native of Minsk, Belarus, who has lived in New York since 2008. He holds a doctorate in musicology from the Belarusian State Academy of Music and is a multi-instrumentalist, playing klezmer, classical, and improvisational music on woodwinds and keyboards. Slepovitch is also a composer, arranger, conductor, and a music and Yiddish educator.
He is a founding member of the critically acclaimed klezmer collective Litvakus and the Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble, and a regular contributor to productions by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Slepovitch serves as the musician-in-residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, where he has produced three critically acclaimed albums, along with video and concert series.
His credits include the movie “Defiance,” the album “Eternal Echoes” (Sony Classical), “Rejoice” with Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot (PBS), and “Fiddler on the Roof” in Yiddish (off-Broadway). In 2022, Slepovitch began performing at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, first as a woodwind player, and later as a pianist.
Matt has studied Yiddish Drumming at KlezKamp and KlezKanada with Julie Epstein, Elaine Hoffman-Watts, David Licht and Aaron Alexander. He regularly plays for the National Yiddish Theatre/Folksbiene where he has accompanied such greats as Bruce Adler A”H, Mike Burstein, Elmore James, and Tony Perry. Since 2006 Matt has been the staff drummer/percussionist at our synagogue.
Matt is also an audio engineer and A/V digital media specialist at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.
