Berry Sakharof

İzmir, Tel Aviv, Brussels

Sakharof was born in İzmir on 7 July 1957 and came to Israel with his family at the age of three. He was named after his grandfather Bernard Sakharof, a Russian pianist. He started playing in public at sixteen, in a band called Cosmic Dream alongside Rami Fortis — a partnership that would keep resurfacing for the next five decades.

After military service he left for Belgium, and the band he co-founded there, Minimal Compact, became the first Israeli rock group to build a real audience outside the country. Its records came out on the European independent circuit across the 1980s: an EP in 1981, then One by One in 1982, Deadly Weapons in 1984, Raging Souls in 1985 and The Figure One Cuts in 1987. The group broke up in 1988, put out two further collections in 2004 and played revival shows in 2011.

The decade had a hard edge to it as well. On 24 July 1984 Sakharof was arrested at Ben Gurion Airport carrying cocaine; he served eight months of a one-year sentence. He has never built a mythology around it, and it sits in his biography as a fact rather than a chapter.

Writing in Hebrew

The solo work began in 1991 with All or Nothing. Two years later came Signs of Weakness, made with the producer and multi-instrumentalist Rea Mochiach, which a Ynet readers' poll later placed eleventh among the best Israeli albums ever made. By the middle of the decade Sakharof was among the highest-grossing live acts in the country.

Touches, in 1998, was the commercial peak — platinum within days of release. The Other followed in 2001, a record that carried explicit references to the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas and remains the clearest statement of the stern, interior side of his writing. A live double covering 1993 to 2002 arrived in 2003, and 11 Alef, again with Mochiach, in 2005.

What held across those records was a particular sound: harmonic minor lines borrowed from Middle Eastern modality, synthesisers and samplers sitting level with the guitars, and a singing voice that stays narrow and controlled even when the material is at its most heated. Globes, writing in September 2026, called it an almost dangerous pathos — effective because it is held back rather than let out.

Work made with other people

Sakharof's catalogue is unusually collaborative for a frontman. The duo with Rami Fortis, Fortisakharof, produced 1900? in 1990, When the Guitar Saws the Night in 1992 and On the Watch in 2006; Songkick's records count twenty-five shared bills between the two men, and twenty with Mochiach. He produced Fortis's Tales from the Box in 1988, Micha Shitrit's Nails and Feathers in 1998 and the debut by Ha'Biluim in 2003, and cut the Birthday EP with the trance producers Infected Mushroom in 2002.

Two projects stand slightly apart. In 2009 he and Mochiach set the medieval Hebrew poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol to music on Ibn Gabirol: Red Lips, which treated eleventh-century verse as rock lyric without softening either. Then in January 2017 he and Ehud Banai released She Appeared Like the Wind, twelve tracks of Ladino song mostly translated into Hebrew by the two of them, with one piece left in the original and one instrumental. Both men had heard the language at home — Sakharof through the Turkish side of his family — and they had been circling the material since 2001. They played the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv across January and February 2017 with keyboards, accordion, bass, percussion, strings and drums.

Between Ibn Gabirol and the present day, the only solo album of his own songs was You Are Here, in 2011.

2 September 2026, around eleven o'clock

Sakharof was playing the Kav Rakia series at Park Ariel Sharon in Tel Aviv on the evening of 2 September 2026 when he told the audience there was a surprise coming at midnight: after fifteen years, a new album. Sulam HaAhava — Ladder of Love — went up at midnight on 3 September, his tenth studio record. Physical copies were scheduled to ship in early November 2026.

It runs ten songs and thirty-seven minutes, recorded over roughly three years, with some of the writing older than that. Ben Handler produced, and also plays bass in the touring band. Most of the words are Sakharof's own; two songs come from other writers, among them Micha Shitrit and the late Dan Toren, who died of cancer in May 2024. The sleeve photograph is by the late Ido Rosenthal.

The sound moves away from the guitar-led attack of the 1990s records. Ynet described a record that sets aside sweeping guitars in favour of electronics and eastern inflection, trading the urban alienation of the earlier work for something warmer; the guitars are still there, but in a supporting role.

How it landed

The Israeli press treated the release as an event and then declined to oversell the music. Haaretz, on 7 September 2026, ran it under the line that Sakharof chooses to believe and dance in the face of death, and judged that anyone expecting a masterpiece would be disappointed, while the record does contain passages that rush forward with real momentum. The same review noted how much more physical a performer he has become over the past two decades — the hands have always moved, and at some point the feet joined in, with or without a guitar strapped on.

Ynet called it a complete statement that needs more than one hearing, and argued that fifteen years of silence gives a record a weight that a two-year release cycle cannot. Globes, on 12 September, went further from criticism into appreciation, pointing out how much of the writing leans on Hebrew words that carry their own freight — avadim, nigun, tikkun, bustan — and concluding that his standing is not really at stake either way.

Two things are fair to say from the coverage as a whole: nobody has filed it alongside Signs of Weakness or The Other, and nobody has written him off.

The band on stage this autumn

The current run is short and domestic. Kfar Saba's Heichal HaTarbut on Thursday 19 November 2026 at 21:00, the Charles Bronfman Auditorium at Heichal HaTarbut in Tel Aviv on Tuesday 24 November at 21:00 with doors at 19:30, the Haifa Auditorium on Saturday 28 November, and the hall at Kibbutz Hazore'a on Wednesday 2 December. A further date is listed at Nahariya's cultural hall on 4 January 2027. Songkick counts sixteen Sakharof shows across 2026 and about 17,200 users tracking him for alerts; Tel Aviv-Jaffa is comfortably his most-played city, with 164 appearances logged there.

The Tel Aviv billing is explicit about what the show is: an expanded ensemble, songs from Sulam HaAhava making their stage debuts, and familiar material in new arrangements. Eight musicians are named — Nir Mansur on drums, Gidi Raz on samplers and guitar, Oren Lotenberg on electric guitar, Ben Handler on bass, Yonatan Daskal on keys, Galia Hai on viola, Hila Epstein on cello and Eyal Talmudi on woodwinds. The string and wind parts are the giveaway: this is the arrangement-heavy version of the catalogue rather than the four-piece rock version.