He performs with various ensembles in Israel and around the world, playing a wide variety of musical styles. Yair was born into a Jewish family that immigrated to Israel from Yemen in 1949.

The search for his roots awakened in him the desire to learn to play the oud and to perform songs by the great Jewish-Yemenite poets such as Rabbi Sshalom Shabazi (1619-ca.1720). Since the age of 13, Yair has served as a cantor in a synagogue, and today he prepares bar mitzvah boys to read from the Torah according to Yemenite tradition.

The longing for her father’s homeland, the stories about life in Yemen, prayer in the Yemeni tradition and her poetry was always present.

The Yemenite Jews are one of the most isolated, forgotten and original communities of the Jewish people. This vibrant Jewish community lived in Yemen until the middle of the 20th century, when almost all Jews fled due to pogroms and settled in Israel. Between 1949 and 1950, the approximately 50,000 remaining Jews were ransomed by Israel and brought to Israel with an airlift from Aden.

Yemeni Jewish traditions claim that Jewish settlement in Yemen dates back to the biblical times of King Solomon.

The Yemenite Jews have preserved a well-defined chanting arrangement that comprises the actual poetic creation and also includes a song and dance performance accompanied by drumming on an empty tin can (tankah) or a copper plate.

These songs of the Yemenite Jews can be divided into men’s and women’s songs. The men’s songs are usually sung in Hebrew, while the women’s songs are always sung in Arabic. The men’s songs come mainly from the Divan, a religious book of poetry written mainly by the famous Rabbi Shalom Shabazi in the seventeenth century.