About JEWISH

JEWISH did not begin as a film. It began as a songbook. In 2017 Walter J. Kin, who releases his music as RIGLI, founded a project to bring old Jewish songs back to life for a new generation. He called it Jewish Songs. In Russian, and he has been its sole creator and founder ever since.

At the origin of that work stood two founding voices. The poet and translator Olga Anikina gave the old melodies new Russian words. The singer Elechka gave them her living voice. Their artistry, in great measure, made the project's early success, and from the very first recordings the people who wrote back to say a song had moved them were, again and again, not Jewish at all. They had simply heard something true.

The songs traveled further than anyone expected. Across dozens of countries the catalog has earned, as of June-July 2026, 4.2 million catalog streams on LANDR alone, plus 4.5 million views on the RIGLI YouTube channel. Most of this audience is Russian-speaking, and Jews are a fraction of a percent of the Russian-speaking world, so the listeners are overwhelmingly not Jewish. A largely non-Jewish audience had fallen in love with deeply specific Jewish song. That is the quiet miracle at the center of everything that followed.

From there the project grew into English. Walter began rebuilding the songs in his own English adaptations, under the name Jewish Songs. In English, opening the same music to an even wider audience while keeping faith with where each song came from.

JEWISH, the movie musical now in development, grew out of all of this. It is a film, shot for the screen, not a stage show: inside the story the students build their own stage production and name it Jewish The Musical, while the film around them is simply JEWISH. It is one of the first big iterations of the larger project, not the whole of it. The film tells, as a story, the very thing the songbook has been doing in real life: a class of students carries inherited Jewish song outward, in English and in their own modern sound, until a whole public square sings it back.