Joey Weisenberg
Founder and Director, Hadar’s Rising Song Institute
Joey Weisenberg is the Founder, Creative Director, and Lead Educator of The Hadar Institute’s Rising Song Institute, which he established in 2016. Weisenberg founded RSI to create a home for the Jewish music and educational prayer content and programs he had been developing since joining Hadar in 2004. The focus of his work is in changing how American Jews relate to prayer and community by transforming t’filah and song into a co-created communal act of spirituality and cultural expression.
Since 2007, Weisenberg has visited and taught in hundreds of communities, universities, yeshivot, seminaries, conferences, synagogues, and festivals around the world and across the Jewish denominational spectrum, helping communities learn how to sing together.
In 2024, Weisenberg, along with the Hadar Community Group project, helped launch over one hundred Rising Song Circles around the United States.
He also has an online educational platform of Master Classes in Jewish Song and Prayer. Through these courses, Weisenberg has created widely accessible pathways to in-depth Jewish song leading and musical training.
Weisenberg has performed and taught extensively around the world, and his music has reached hundreds of thousands of people. With each gathering, he aims to help participants experience a feeling of joint interdependence and bring that energy back to their home communities.
A critical aspect of Weisenberg’s work is training emerging musical-spiritual practitioners, religious leaders, and musicians who can inspire others and cultivate singing communities across the country.
“Joey is a mentor to so many budding artists and musicians, offering intensive teaching about music and Torah and helping them blossom into fully-fledged composers and musicians,” said Peninnah Schram, Professor Emerita of Speech and Drama at Yeshiva University, who nominated him for the award.
“He brings them into his community, invites them to perform with him, encourages them to create their own music, and produces their albums. He has created a network of fellow artists—an amazing and important group in which people care for each other, collaborate, and support each other in the work of making Judaism more soulful and beautiful.”
“Wow, what an honor!” Weisenberg said, upon hearing that he’d been selected for the 2026 Award.
“I teach Jewish communities how to sing together, channeling the songs and dreams of hundreds of people who have generously shared music and life with me throughout the years. I was lucky to be a student of past Covenant Award recipients including Ateret Cohen, Peninnah Schram, and Rabbi Shai Held, whose stories and teachings will resonate through me forever. My deepest thanks to my teachers and colleagues at the Hadar Institute who lift up the many voices of Torah and sing a brighter Jewish future into being.”
