Riki Rose has been told her voice was wasted on her because it wasn’t given to a man. She was born into Williamsburg’s Satmar community, one of the most insular and strictly observant of the Chasidic Jewish sects, but traded her hair covering for a natural bob, her black stockings for pink skirts and “Take No Shit” socks. Now 32 years old, the singer-songwriter tours the country making her voice heard with a blend of musical styles ranging from the pre-war shtetls to Motown.

I had just arrived at Rose’s home when she received a call from a Chareidi yeshiva student. I listened without understanding as she conversed in Yiddish, her native language. After she hung up, Rose explained that the young man on the other end was a secret fan, calling to share his praise. This surprised me because of a law called kol isha, which forbids Chareidi men from listening to a woman singing. But Rose told me she gets these calls often and that many rebellious yeshiva boys listen to women singing when they aren’t under rabbinical or parental supervision.

Rose offered me a juice. “I used to drink coffee, but I can’t,” she said over the grinding of her juicer. Coffee gives her anxiety, which surprised me because I’d heard her say in other interviews that she never gets stage fright. But she told me it’s not that kind of anxiety. “I have it in my body. I think I'm dying all the time,” she went on. In fact, it inspired her recent single, “Breathe in Breathe Out,” or, in Yiddish, Utem Arein Utem Arois. “It’s never as bad as it is in my head. So, breathe in, breathe out.” She has also struggled with asthma. The song is a remedy for her own diagnoses as much as it may be for anyone listening.

Suddenly, Rose’s phone rang again. It was the yeshiva student. Even without understanding her Yiddish, I could tell this call was taking a different tone than the last. It was clear the person on the other end of the line needed a friend, and for eight minutes, Rose took on that role. After the call ended, Rose followed her own advice and took a deep breath. “Okay,” she exhaled. “Listen what just happened, I have to translate.”

She explained that the student wanted to cut off his beard and payos and leave the ultra-orthodox community. He saw Rose on social media, how happy she looked wearing pants and other modern clothes, and he was inspired to do the same. Rose told him to get a therapist before he makes any drastic moves. He was “obviously having some kind of internal conflict,” she said. And she insisted that cutting off his beard and changing his clothes “is not going to help him escape from himself.”

Rose knows something about this. She may appear happy and successful on social media, but she’s faced many hardships as she’s recovered from an oppressive life. “You'd look at the screen—I'm so happy. But I'm not always happy. I have hard days. Until I got to a point where I was more [free] with myself. It was a struggle,” she says. “I’ve been wandering around in galus (exile).”

***

I first heard Rose sing on Here’s Modi, a podcast hosted by comedian Modi Rosenfeld. I may not have been able to understand the words of her stirring rendition of Nisht Gedaiget Yiden, “Don’t Worry Jews,” but it spoke to my soul. “Riki Rose is a vessel for a gift from God,” Rosenfeld told me. But I wanted to know how, after all she has been through, after leaving a community that’s so notoriously hard to leave, after breaking down and repairing herself so many times, she could exude so much love and light.

Within the Satmar community, Rose was born into a small splinter movement known as Bnei Yoel, or “Sons of Yoel.” Those within Bnei Yoel only adhere to the traditions and teachings from the era of the founder of Satmar, Yoel Teitelbaum, and reject the leadership of his successors after his death. It was an intense way of life, and Rose said her father was obsessed with the rules of modesty for women, forcing his wife and daughters to wear a type of head covering called a shpitzel. Additional strain was brought on by their difficult financial situation. Rose grew up very poor, which she said has contributed to the shopping addiction she struggles with as an adult.

“I'm organizing my finances. Something I've been avoiding [doing] for a very long time,” she says. “But I'm healing my relationship with money.” She looked up to the heavens and continued, “Money and opportunity come to me in abundance. Is that the way I say it?” She paused, as though she was actively attempting to capture a moment of anxiety before it got the best of her, “I don’t know. My mantra.”

Despite her poverty, Rose discovered her musical inclinations at an early age. Her sisters would put her in a chair, and she would sing songs that emulated Yiddish cantors, accompanied with hand gestures seen by popular male-Chasidic singers. “You had never seen a three-year-old Chasidishe girl sing the way I used to sing,” she exclaimed. “I would copy Avraham Fried [a famous Chasidic singer] from a very young age.”

The main source of support was her eldest sister. But that only lasted until Rose was five years old when her sister got married and moved. She could still sing in the house, but her mother would often remark that Rose should keep her voice down so the boys next door would not hear her. Any leeway that Rose’s mother provided ended as soon as she turned twelve, when she became a woman according to halacha. As far as her mother was concerned, Rose says, “It was time to shut up.”

***

Spending time with Rose, I noticed her tendency to insert laughter into the most serious conversations. I was in the car with her when the song “Dance with My Father” by Luther Vandross began to play. I told her the song makes me emotional. To which Rose replied, laughing, “I guess I don't relate to the song because I never had a loving father.”

“I just always hated being serious growing up. I hated it,” she says. “I'd never had a serious moment in my life, in my entire childhood. I kept everything light and funny, probably from trauma to keep everything funny so that it's not sad.”

All she ever wanted when she was a little girl was her father’s approval. “He’s never once said a positive thing,” she claimed. “And when my mother would confront him about it, she'd be like, ‘Say something nice to the kids.’ He'd be like, ‘Stupid people need compliments. Smart people need criticism.’ So that was a compliment.”

The small school she attended encouraged her creative freedom and gave her an escape from life at home. “We had plays and stuff like that, I was able to use a lot of creativity,” Rose says. “They made sure everybody [shined]. That's the one thing I loved about my school.” But Rose yearned for more than her grade school performances. “I would always dream of bigger things, being on a big stage.”

When she was seventeen, she decided to audition for a talent show at the Bais Yaakov High School in Borough Park, an orthodox community that was modern by Rose’s family’s standards. Leah Forster, who is now well known in Jewish circles for comedy based on her Chasidic upbringing, would judge auditions and host the show.

“I thought, Bais Yaakov? My mother's never going to let me do this. This is too far out,” Rose recalled. She lied to her mother about where she was going.

She went into the audition with extra chutzpah because she figured that these “modern” people could handle it. “I went insane, I went crazy,” she says. “I was dancing, I sang, I was doing my little runs; I gave it my all.”

The next morning, she received a call from Forster: “Okay, Rivkale Rosenberg: Who are you?” Forster continued, “I loved it, but you cannot be singing like that. This is Bais Yaakov.” Given that, to Rose, Borough Park was considered modern, she was confused when Forster explained further. “You have to understand, these ladies are very frum (religious). We want you in the next round, but you have to tone it down a bit.”

Rose didn’t win the talent show, but Forster didn’t forget about her. The following year, Forster reached out, offering Rose a ticket to a concert at Brooklyn College featuring Kineret, an orthodox singer. When she received the ticket, Rose, as bold as ever, asked Forster if she could perform a song.

Her wish was granted, and for the first time, she sang in front of a proper audience, something that brought shame upon her parents.

Her creative career had officially begun. She started carrying her guitar around to perform for sick people. She gained traction on social media during the pandemic, posting comedy videos with a friend portraying the Chasidishe mame archetype, cooking and makeup tutorials, and singing. In 2021, she joined a group of frum women to record the song “Still Your Friend,” for which they filmed a music video, while she released her first independent music video four years later for her single “Shluf.”

***

Even having left the folds of Satmar, Rose still recites the blessings over food with Chareidi-style pronunciation. Over a meal at her house, instead of “bah-rookh,” she said “boo-rikh.” Since I’ve spent some time in Borough Park circles, I adapted and responded “ooh-mayn,” instead of “ah-main.”

“I like that you said ‘ooh-mayn,’” Rose laughed, relishing the nostalgia.

We finished eating, and Rose had to get ready for a wedding that evening. Her mother would be there, so she needed to find a wig to wear. According to Rose, her father hasn’t spoken to her in years. Her mother has grown more tolerant of Rose’s unorthodox life, but there are still certain things her mother cannot fathom—like Rose not covering her hair in public. Rose is divorced, but once a Chasidic woman has been married she is expected to continue wearing a covering. While her mother donned a shpitzel, Rose wore a sheitel, a wig, after her wedding—a physical manifestation of her rebellious nature.

We went to her car to get an old wig out of her trunk that her sister let her borrow. It had seen better days, but Rose was going to try to salvage it.

“Have you seen my room yet? It’s all pink,” she said. But it wasn’t all pink. I noticed some black here and there—new additions to her wardrobe—and she admitted her style has been evolving: “I used to never have black, but now I have tons of black . . . pink and black is so nice.”

I watched as she rummaged through her closet, looking for an outfit modest enough to cover her elbows and wrists. She cobbled something together, then went to her bathroom mirror to work on her wig. I continued to watch as she combed every strand of hair into place, tucking each of her own hairs under the wig. “Whoever made this wig did not do a good job. Lemme tell you that,” she remarked. “I've worn wigs in my life. They have not done a great job.”

I confessed I was beginning to feel embarrassed, like I was watching something taboo, and asked whether I should avert my gaze.

“I’m not doing anything inappropriate!” she laughed. “It’s interesting to see this, no?”

I watched her through the mirror making this unique and striking transformation. It was almost like she couldn’t decide what it meant for herself. “This is bad,” she said. Then a few seconds later, “It’s not so bad!”

“How do you feel when you see yourself in the mirror like this?” I asked.

“I don’t feel anything,” she said, monotone.

“Is it still you?”

“Yeah, it's very much still me . . . I just need to fix this. This is a mess over here.”

Rose always seems to exhibit this tension between hope and despair. In the same breath, she recognizes the negative and the positive. This even manifests itself physically, down to her black and pink wardrobe. But Rose isn’t just a two-sided coin. She has many different parts all on the same side. She is a vast mosaic. When you zoom out, it’s hard to see the cracks between the tiles—the past and the present—that make her who she is. Like Modi Rosenfeld says, she is a vessel. One that has been broken and repaired many times over but comes wrapped in a pink bow glimmering with hope.

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