Eyal Golan's "Am Yisrael Chai" came out on 19 October 2023, twelve days into the war, written and composed by Avi Ohayon and Ofir Cohen, and finished the Hebrew year at the top of Media Forest's Israeli airplay chart. The words are recent and belong to their writers; they are printed here, word by word, by the site owner's decision, for learning — the provenance line at the foot of the page says so, and it says how the vowel points got there: not from an edition, because none exists, but from the same pointing engine the site's translator uses, read line by line before this page was built. The Hebrew is plain and current — the words a learner hears on the radio and at every gathering since — and the title is the oldest thing in it: a slogan older than the state, whose life as a sung line goes back through Carlebach in 1965 to one question in Genesis, ha-od avi chai, "is my father still alive?"
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Key: Dm · 3 chords used ·Dm · Gm · A7
105 BPM (Spotify's tempo analysis, via Tunebat) · D minor · 3:30 · verses on Dm–Gm–A7–Dm, the bridge and chorus on B♭–F–Gm, an A before the chorus turns home, and the o-o-o tag on Dm–F–C–Gm · to reset the chord panel:
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Nearly every verb is future, first person plural: נֵדַע (ne-da), נְחַכֶּה (ne-cha-ke), נֵדַע (ne-da) — "we will know", "we will wait". Golan is not describing; he is promising, on behalf of a "we" that is the whole country. כּוּלָּם (ku-lam) is the everyday word for everybody, and הַבַּיְתָה (ha-bai-ta) carries the old directional ending -a: הַבַּיְתָה (ha-bai-ta) is not "the house" but "homeward", the same ending as in "artza", "to the land". הַלְוַואי (hal-vai) is the word you say when you wish for something you cannot arrange yourself.
עַם (am) הַנֶּצַח (ha-ne-tzach) — "the people of eternity" — is a fixed phrase, and its second half is not the ordinary word for "forever" (לְעוֹלָם (le-o-lam), which comes right after it) but the older netzach, victory or endurance. The line then says the eternal people is never afraid, and the next line adds "even when it is hard to see": כְּשֶׁקָּשֶׁה (kshe-ka-she) is three pieces welded into one word, ke- "when", she- "that", kashe "hard". שֶׁיִּשָּׂרְפוּ (she-yi-sar-fu) is a wish in the third person — "may they burn" — with the she- prefix that turns a plain future into a "let".
in the ups and in the downs, in the hardest hours too.
The three words of the title, twice, and each time with a condition or a scope hung on them. חַי (chai) is one syllable and does double duty: it is the adjective "alive" and the verb "lives", and the slogan means both at once. מְאוּחָדִים (me-u-cha-dim) is the plural of me'uchad, "united", from the same root as echad, "one" — to be united is literally to be made one. בַּעֲלִיּוֹת (ba-a-li-yot) and בַּיְּרִידוֹת (bay-ri-dot) are aliyot and yeridot, "ascents" and "descents", the same two words Israelis use for moving to the country and leaving it; here they are simply the good stretches and the bad ones.
הַקָּדוֹשׁ (ha-ka-dosh) בָּרוּךְ (ba-ruch) הוּא (hu) is the standard way of naming God in speech and prayer, "the Holy One, blessed be He", and שׁוֹמֵר (sho-mer) עָלֵינוּ (a-lei-nu) is what the Psalms and the evening prayer say He does. כִּי (ki) אֵין (ein) לָנוּ (la-nu) עוֹד (od) מְדִינָה (me-di-na), "we have no other country", echoes Ehud Manor's 1982 song Ein li eretz acheret, "I have no other country", which every Israeli knows. בָּנֵינוּ (ba-nei-nu) is written without vowels in the lyric as printed, and that spelling can be read two ways: banenu, "our sons", which the parallel with יְלָדֵינוּ (ye-la-dei-nu) "our children" supports, or beinenu, "among us", which the phrase "make peace among us" from the liturgy would suggest; the pointing engine chose the first and it is kept here, with the other reading noted. הָאֱמוּנָה (ha-e-mu-na) is emunah, faith, and the whole line is Hatikvah's od lo avdah tikvatenu — "our hope is not yet lost" — with faith in place of hope.
The verse that reaches for the old words. בַּרְזֶל (bar-zel) שֶׁל (shel) חֲרָבוֹת (cha-ra-vot), "iron of swords", is the name of the war — Charvot Barzel, "Swords of Iron" — turned round. הַתִּקְוָוה (ha-tik-va) בַּת (bat) שְׁנוֹת (shnot) אַלְפַּיִם (al-pa-yim) is Hatikvah, word for word: "the hope, two thousand years old", the second line of the anthem's chorus, and בַּת (bat) is the idiom Hebrew uses for age — a hope that is a "daughter of" two thousand years. The lyric site prints that last word as a numeral; the page shows the word the anthem sings, and the provenance below records the swap. נַחֲלָתֵנוּ (na-cha-la-te-nu) nachalatenu, "our inheritance", is Bible Hebrew for the land as something handed down.
The bridge comes back with one word changed in its second line — שֶׁקָּשֶׁה (she-ka-she) for כְּשֶׁקָּשֶׁה (kshe-ka-she), "that" for "when", which is how the lyric site prints it — and a different last line: instead of "let the wars burn", the promise from the end of the second verse, נֵצֵא (ne-tze) לָשִׁיר (la-shir) בָּרְחוֹבוֹת (bar-cho-vot). Then the chorus again, and the wordless o-o-o over Dm–F–C–Gm that closes the recording.
♫ Singing notes
Golan's recording sits at a steady 105 beats a minute in D minor. The chorus is the title phrase itself — Am Yisrael Chai — sung over B♭ and F and answered by a line over Gm and Dm; land on chai.
The song has three shapes and you can hear where you are from the chords: the verses sit on the Dm–Gm–A7–Dm turnaround, the bridge lifts to B♭–F–Gm–Dm (with a C on the way down), and the chorus stays up on B♭–F–Gm until an A pulls it back to Dm. Learn the turnaround first; the rest is the same four chords in a different order.
The chart at negina.co.il gives the whole song in Dm and also a capo-5 version played with Am shapes (Am, Dm, E, C, G, F), which is the easier grip for most guitarists and puts the song in the same sounding key.
After the chorus comes a long wordless o-o-o over Dm–F–C–Gm, ending on the title again. It is the part a crowd carries when it does not know the words, and it is where the song is loudest.
The lines are short and the words are everyday ones — this is one of the easiest songs on the site to sing from the Hebrew rather than from the transliteration. Start with the chorus and the bridge, which repeat, and add the verses after.
♦ About this song
The song
Released as a single on 19 October 2023, during the war, and later on an album of the same name. Words and music by Avi Ohayon and Ofir Cohen; arrangement and production by Ofir Cohen and Shimon Yechia; the recording runs about three and a half minutes. Its proceeds were pledged to ERAN, Israel's emotional first-aid line. It reached number one on Media Forest's Israeli airplay chart, number five on the Galgalatz chart, and finished the Hebrew year 5784 as Media Forest's number one; by August 2025 the official video had passed 33 million views. The video is footage of soldiers, people holding flags, memorial candles being lit, rescue volunteers, solidarity rallies and worshippers at the Western Wall.
The slogan, before the song
"Am Yisrael Chai" is much older than any recording of it. A version of it appears in a Zionist songbook as early as 1895 and with sheet music in a 1927 collection. In 1933 Rabbi Stephen Wise closed the World Jewish Conference's boycott address with it. On 20 April 1945, five days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, a Shabbat service for survivors was recorded by the BBC: they sang Hatikvah, and a chaplain called out "Am Yisrael Chai" over the end of it — the recording survives. In 1965 Shlomo Carlebach wrote his song of that name for the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, at Jacob Birnbaum's request, and first sang it in public at their rally outside the Soviet mission to the UN on 4 April 1965; his lyric was built out of Genesis 45:3, Joseph's question ha-od avi chai, "is my father still alive?", turned into the answer od avinu chai, "our father still lives". The Forward has called the phrase second only to Hatikvah as an anthem of the Jewish people. Every song titled "Am Yisrael Chai" since — and there were several new ones in October 2023 — is standing on that history.
What the song quotes
Besides the title, the second verse sings a line straight out of Hatikvah — the hope, two thousand years old, hatikvah bat shnot alpayim — which is Imber's 1878 text and is on this site word by word as the first song in this section. The chorus closes on "the faith is not lost", lo avdah ha'emunah, an echo of Hatikvah's od lo avdah tikvatenu, "our hope is not yet lost", with faith in place of hope. "The eternal people is not afraid" is a familiar phrase as well, and "we have no other country" echoes Ehud Manor's Ein li eretz acheret. Those lines are the song reaching for the oldest words it can find, around a lyric that is entirely 2023.
How the Hebrew on this page was made, and who owns it