- September 11, 2026
- 2:11 am
- World News
October 15 — Haifa, October 21 — Netanya, October 23 — Bat Yam. Felix Shinder returns to Israel with “Lemonchiki”, “7:40”, klezmer, Utyosov, and that very Odessa intonation. But behind the cheerful poster, there is another story: after 2022, his concerts in Europe became charitable, and part of the income from one of the previous Israeli tours was directed to children of Ukrainian refugees.
Author — Anton Pshydynskyi
On September 9, 2026, Israeli producer Svetlana Berdetskaya announced new Israeli concerts of Felix Shinder. And here, as is customary in Odessa, everything seems clear, but there are details.
Tickets are already available on SHOWMAN.
In the initial poster, Haifa was scheduled for October 17. However, the current SHOWMAN ticketing system now says otherwise: October 15, 2026, Thursday, 19:00. So we looked not only at the announcement but also where they are already asking for shekels for tickets. As of September 10, three concerts are officially listed: Haifa, Netanya, and Bat Yam.
It turns out to be a real little Israeli route of Odessa.
October 15 — Haifa, Matnas Adar, Beitenu Hall, Yerushalayim St., 29, starts at 19:00, ticket — 166 shekels.
October 21 — Netanya, Arik Einstein Auditorium, Bnei Berman St., 6, starts at 19:00; program “L’chaim, friends!”, duration one and a half hours, tickets cost 161–181 shekels.
And October 23 — Bat Yam, Lagra Bar, Atzrifim St., 3, 19:00, ticket — 166 shekels.
And if someone now asks, what do these three cities and the whole article have to do with it — well, Felix Shinder is coming to Israel not just to sing a couple of songs about Odessa-mama. He has his own old scores with this country. In a good way.
Odessa does not come with a suitcase — it comes with an accordion
Organizers call Shinder “the voice of modern Odessa.” The wording is promotional, but in this case, there is something to latch onto. His program is indeed assembled like an old Odessa courtyard, where no one particularly asked what language we would sing in today.
There will be “Lemonchiki”, “7:40”, “Chaim”, “Jewish Wedding”, songs by Leonid Utyosov. Next to them — “Hava Nagila”, “A Yidishe Mame”, “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem” and Shinder’s own songs. Klezmer meets modern folk, and on top of all this, a blues harmonica periodically appears — an instrument that the musician himself carries through a significant part of his creative biography.
In Netanya, organizers separately promise improvisation and conversation with the audience. And this is already very Shinder-like: his concert is traditionally arranged so that the viewer risks finding themselves not in a chair, but almost a participant in what is happening. Once his band was advertised with the phrase that there should always be “live fish” at concerts. What exactly was meant — explaining to a real Odessan is somehow awkward.
But Shinder himself takes Odessa folklore noticeably more seriously than it might seem after the first ten minutes of fun. He spent years collecting old songs, searching for recordings, dealing with Yiddish, and trying to separate living urban culture from the stage parody of Odessa.
And here the current concerts unexpectedly intersect with what NAnovosti has been writing about for more than a year. In April 2025, we talked about “Odessa Days in Israel” — a project that simultaneously connected Ukrainian Odessa and Tel Aviv through music, literature, and a shared Jewish history. Shinder does roughly the same thing in his own way: only instead of round tables, he has an accordion, klezmer, and a hall that starts singing along after a while.
Shinder also sang in Ukrainian. On “Voice of the Country,” he performed the folk song “Oh, There on the Hill,” and before the project, according to his own words, he practically did not perform such a repertoire. Svyatoslav Vakarchuk suggested moving away from the usual festive sound, and the song was made with a Balkan intonation.
Peresyp, Cheryomushki, Israel — and back to Odessa
Felix Shinder was born on August 29, 1986, in Odessa. He himself said that he was born in Peresyp, grew up in Cheryomushki, and the family geography included Troitskaya near Marazlievskaya. That is, the set for the future singer of Odessa folklore was quite convincing even before he managed to choose a repertoire.
In 2000, when Felix was 14 years old, the family moved to Israel and settled in Netanya. Here he studied Hebrew at the Akiva Ulpan, then attended a regular school. Two years later, the family returned to Odessa. That is why the current concert on October 21 in Netanya is not quite the usual “first time in the city on tour.” For Shinder, this is a place from his own teenage biography.
And then there was a very non-academic school of life: odd jobs, hitchhiking, Deribasovskaya, music, the street, the harmonica, and a gradual understanding of what exactly he wants to pull from Odessa’s past onto the modern stage.
In one of the interviews, Shinder formulated his longing for old Odessa remarkably briefly: “the sea is the same, the gobies are the same, the cats are the same, but the people are not”. He spoke of a city from which a significant part of that mix of Jews, Greeks, French, Italians, and other communities that created old Odessa had disappeared.
And here begins not a concert anecdote.
On his father’s side, Shinder has Jewish roots. On his mother’s side, as the musician himself said, Jewish, Polish, French, Latvian, and Ukrainian lines mixed. He also recalled the family experience of Soviet anti-Semitism: his mother changed her Jewish surname to enter a music school. Therefore, restoring the Jewish musical tradition does not look like an attempt to add a few recognizable melodies to the show for an Israeli audience. It’s part of the family history.
When in October 2025, Jewish Culture Days were held in Odessa itself, NAnovosti wrote about songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ukrainian, about “Migdal,” Chabad, the Jewish museum, and Israeli authors from Odessa. There was a fairly accurate thought: Jews could leave Odessa, but there are almost no former Odessans. Shinder’s story fits into this formula effortlessly.
“Voice of the Country”: when Odessa went all over Ukraine
The wide Ukrainian public got to know Felix Shinder in 2015 thanks to the fifth season of “Voice of the Country.” At the blind auditions, he performed “When the Night Lanterns Sway,” Potap and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk argued over him, and Shinder himself chose Vakarchuk’s team and reached the final stage of the project.
It was that rare case when the television format did not level the artist with the others. On the contrary, the whole country suddenly saw a person who brought Odessa urban folklore, a specific manner of speaking, and musical material that was hard to confuse with anyone else to the big stage.
The next step was the project “Money Forward”. The musicians called their style Odessa Gangsta Folk — klezmer, urban folklore, Odessa songs, a bit of musical hooliganism. In 2016, the album “Gold of Ancient Odessans / Music Of Ancient Odessites” was released.
It included “Gefilte Fish,” “Chaim,” “Moldavanka,” “Jewish Wedding,” “Lemonchiki,” “Lanterns,” and other things that Shinder did not try to put behind museum glass. The meaning was the opposite: to bring them out, give them a modern arrangement, and make them live again.
Then Odessa music traveled quite far from Moldavanka. In Shinder’s touring history — the USA, Latin America, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Israel; festivals Sommerfestival der Kulturen in Stuttgart, FolkHerbst, International Klezmer Festival Fürth, Atlas Weekend, Jazz Koktebel.
NAnovosti recently talked about a similar project in internal logic UkraYiddish, where Ukrainian songs are translated into Yiddish, and Jewish ones into Ukrainian. This is already another generation and different music, but the mechanism is familiar: Ukrainian and Jewish cultures here do not exist on opposite sides of the museum corridor but continue to talk to each other. In Odessa, such a conversation has been going on for a long time, just sometimes with an accordion.
NAnovosti — Israel News | Nikk.Agency
After February 24, cheerful songs did not disappear. Just next to them appeared war
On February 24, 2022, Felix Shinder was outside Ukraine. Later he settled in France. And here his concert biography changed: Odessa music continued to sound, only more and more often next to the word “concert” appeared another — charitable.
Latvian public media LSM, telling about Shinder in February 2026, noted that since 2022 he has been living in France and actively touring Europe with charitable concerts. Among the cities where he performed are Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Krakow.
The most specific episode was restored from the documents of the Paris Théâtre de la Ville. On November 27, 2022, a large Journée Odessa — “Odessa Day” was held there. In the morning, Shinder accompanied the reading of Ukrainian poetry by Ilya Kaminsky and Kateryna Babkina in French, Ukrainian, and English on the harmonica. In the evening, after the discussion “What is the future of Ukraine?” he, together with accordionist Ivan Netepenko and violinist Yevgeny Falin, played Odessa folk with klezmer intonations.
And most importantly — Théâtre de la Ville directly stated that all proceeds from Journée Odessa were transferred to the charity organization With Hope for the Future, which helped children of Ukraine. Here, no beautiful words are needed: the mechanism is clear — the audience buys tickets for a Ukrainian cultural event, the income goes to children, Shinder takes the stage as one of the participants in this program.
In Israel, his concerts have already helped Ukrainian children
For the Israeli reader, there is an even closer episode.
During one of Felix Shinder’s previous tours in Israel, organizers directly stated in the poster that part of the proceeds from the concerts would be transferred to children of Ukrainian refugees in Israel. And it was not about some late interpretation by journalists — this wording was preserved directly on Israeli ticket pages.
And this is an important part of the current story. Because Shinder’s connection with the Ukrainian community in Israel was not only musical.
For a person who himself lived as a teenager in Netanya, then returned home to Odessa, and after the Russian invasion again found himself outside Ukraine, the story of Ukrainian refugees in Israel clearly did not look like something alien and distant.
Today, this is especially felt against the backdrop of what is happening with Jewish Odessa itself. In June 2026, NAnovosti talked about international support for the city’s Jewish community after a Russian strike that affected the “Or Avner Chabad” complex and the “Mishpacha Ukraine” children’s home. 124 children managed to go down to the shelter. Therefore, the current cheerful concert route of Shinder exists alongside a completely different reality of his native city.
Odessa humor generally works poorly if you forget why this city needed it so many times.
And before the war, charity was not a new profession for Shinder
It would be convenient to write that after February 24, the artist suddenly discovered charity. Only this is not true.
On April 5, 2016, Shinder participated in the Odessa Opera House in the concert “Unforgettable Kvitka,” dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian singer Kvitka Cisyk. Together with him, Oksana Bilozir, Yevgeny Nischuk, Oksana Mukha, Vitaliy Kozlovsky, and other performers took the stage. The project had a charitable component and was associated with helping cancer patients and purchasing medical equipment.
His band participated in other charitable and environmental initiatives. Shinder appeared at public events in Odessa, including World Cleanup Day, and generally gave the impression of a person who is not satisfied with just telling others how they should live correctly.
At the same time, it is important not to confuse two different stories. Shinder’s former band later continued to work under the name Kommuna Lux, already with another vocalist. After the Russian invasion, Kommuna Lux indeed actively collected aid for Ukraine, including for the military, bought equipment and vehicles. But this is the activity of Felix’s former colleagues, not a reason to write that Shinder personally did all this. At NAnovosti, such things are better separated, even when you really want to make the hero even more heroic.
And now — “L’chaim, friends!”
And after all this biography, the name of the Netanya concert begins to sound a little different.
“L’chaim, friends!”
Of course, it can be simply translated: “To life.” But here too much coincided.
A person was born in Odessa, lived as a teenager in Israel, returned home, appeared on the Ukrainian “Voice,” collected old Jewish-Odessa music anew, then again found himself in emigration due to the war. Played charitable concerts for Ukraine. In Israel, part of the proceeds from his performances was given to children of Ukrainian refugees. And now he is coming here again with songs of the city that Russia continues to hit with missiles and drones.
At the same time, no one expects an hour and a half of mourning on stage. Quite the opposite.
There will be “Lemonchiki.” There will be “Seven Forty.” There will be Utyosov. Klezmer. Harmonica. “A Yidishe Mame.” “Hava Nagila.” There will be an audience that will surely start singing somewhere before the artist.
Because Odessa has always been peculiar about this: when life becomes completely unfunny, it somehow stubbornly continues to laugh.
And Shinder knows this intonation.
Where and when
October 15, 2026, Haifa — Matnas Adar, Beitenu Hall, Yerushalayim St., 29. Start — 19:00. Ticket — 166 ₪.
October 21, 2026, Netanya — Arik Einstein Auditorium, Bnei Berman St., 6. “L’chaim, friends!” Start — 19:00, duration — 1 hour 30 minutes. Tickets — 161–181 ₪.
October 23, 2026, Bat Yam — Lagra Bar, Atzrifim St., 3. Start — 19:00. Ticket — 166 ₪.
Tickets are already available on SHOWMAN.
And then everything is simple. As they said in Shinder’s old posters — hold your pocket. This time they will put a little Odessa in it.
