Spoof song becomes surprise Passover hit in US Orthodox communities

A horse wearing sunglasses gallops through the parted Red Sea. A bearded man in a kippah feasts on fruit in front of a partially submerged whale. Biblical Egyptian troops trot through the surf, plates of bread hovering overhead.

“We be winning like the Yidden be doing forever,” a puppet in a yellow life raft raps.

The surrealistic AI-generated images are from the video for a spoof song, “Yum Yum,” that has become a surprise Passover hit in religious Jewish communities in the US. The song and its popularity provide a window into the communities’ online culture that often goes overlooked.

The song is a collaboration between the online personality Rabbi Greenspan and Thank You Hashem, a.k.a. TYH Nation. The group is headquartered in the Five Towns area of Long Island and produces music and sells merchandise with uplifting Jewish themes.

TYH came to prominence with its first song, also called “Thank You Hashem,” by Joey Newcomb. The track became a hit; its video has more than 3 million views on YouTube.

Greenspan is an online persona created by an anonymous community member who peddles memes, satire and songs through different invented characters and under the X handle “Awkward Bachur.” Community media reports have identified Greenspan as a businessman in Lakewood, New Jersey, but in an interview with The Times of Israel, he declined to share personal information or his whereabouts.

“My location is lurking in your subconscious,” he said. “I don’t really have a location, I just lurk,” he said, speaking for his Greenspan character.

Greenspan recorded the first version of the song six months ago as a satire of other upbeat TYH tracks like Mendy Worch’s “Chi Chi Wawa,” labeling the spoof song “Mendy Worch esque.” Greenspan found a “reggae-type” beat on YouTube, plugged a microphone into his computer, and recorded the vocals with Logic Pro software.

“I was just trying to think, ‘What’s a TYH type of energy?’” Greenspan said. “I just winged it. It was a one-take type of thing and I just put it out without thinking too much.”

Listeners forwarded the song to the TYH team, said brothers Aryeh and Elimelech Blumstein.

“A lot of our music has very, very important and serious messages, but it’s brought out in a more fun way, so this song was kind of poking fun of that. It was a light, satirical take on what we generally do. We heard it and we laughed. We loved it,” Elimelech Blumstein said.

The TYH team contacted Greenspan about collaborating and he agreed. TYH producers Izzy Drihem and Mendy Portnoy polished the song and the team brought in other artists, including the anonymous online personality Afiko.man and the actual Mendy Worch, who both added verses. Israeli producer Shai Barak made the video using AI. Greenspan’s persona in the song is modeled on an alter-ego he created, called Pinchos Lurkowitz, for a satirical video series. Mendy Worch appears as himself and Afiko.man is a puppet.

The months-long process for the Passover-themed track wrapped up just before the holiday, and the song made a splash. Local news sites listed the track on holiday season music lists and dubbed it “this year’s #1 hit.” Other singers have performed the song at live events. The song’s reach is hard to discern because much of the community’s online discourse takes place on non-public WhatsApp channels, but the video has more than 50,000 views on YouTube.

The lyrics combine upbeat messaging, wordplay and gibberish in English, Hebrew and Yiddish. “Yum yum,” for example, alludes to eating and the Hebrew word for sea, yam — a prominent setting in the Passover story and the music video. The horse, mentioned in the opening line and seen in images throughout the video, refers to Pharaoh’s horses in the Exodus story.

The whales in the video and the “levyason” in the lyrics allude to the Biblical leviathan, which, Greenspan jests, may have snacked on the hapless Egyptians. Afiko.man is a play on the Passover tradition of the affikomen, where adults hide a piece of matzah during the holiday for children to find.

“We’ll be fabregnen with the Yidden when Moshiach comes, yeah,” the song says. “We be eating the big fishy swishy, yum yum.”

“We be winning since the beginning like the Yidden with the tzaddikim,” it says.

AI-generated imagery shows Rabbi Greenspan, Mendy Worch, and Afiko.man in the music video for ‘Yum Yum.’ (TYH Nation)

Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, the founder of Tech Tribe, a community for Jews in tech and digital media, said the song “shows the maturity of meme culture among frum Jews.” He added that Greenspan’s account was influential in the online sphere.

“That account generates a lot of memes. It’s almost the Dril of the frum world, in a positive way,” he said, referring to a popular X account.

The community’s online personalities “all kind of united for this crazy mash up to share a song that underscores what I see as the positive potential of the internet,” Lightstone said. “The internet, at its core, is there for everyone to use it to connect to each other, uplift each other, teach Torah, spread Judaism.”

The community’s internet culture is overlooked, Lightstone said. Online chatter and trading in memes often takes place in WhatsApp groups, away from the public eye.

“Often coverage in the broader media is relegated to documenting antisemitism or through a lens that often paints them as weird or negative. Almost an othering,” Lightstone said. “There are people who are using the internet like everyone else, but in a positive way to share, and they’re fluent in that language.”

The song has fueled further memes of its own, some of which are shared by Greenspan on X.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD @endimem_music pic.twitter.com/exsTizvScz

— Yaakov Langer (@jacklanger) April 18, 2025

FISHY SWISHY YUM YUM???? pic.twitter.com/gE7LFgFaUU

— EG (@EG_613) April 17, 2025

But what does the song actually mean?

“They asked me the same question, and I said it meant absolutely nothing,” Greenspan said.

The TYH team told him otherwise, however, saying, “We’re not sure what the deeper meaning is, but there’s always a deeper meaning,” Greenspan said.

Aryeh Blumstein said the song was open to interpretation and that dozens of people have suggested different meanings. The song’s chorus, for example, insists that you can bring a horse to a fabregnen — a spiritual, festive gathering — and you also make him drink, or sing. The line could refer to bringing a reticent Jewish person to a community gathering, he said.

“If you remember the fact that you could bring a horse to the fabregnen and you could make him sing, there’s no Jew that’s not open to anything,” he said. “There’s a lot of concepts in the song, and the user could do whatever he wants, take the message as deep as they want.”

“I want to say on the record, I don’t know what it means,” Greenspan said in response.

While the message might be muddled, the song’s intent is not. The goal of the track is to uplift listeners during the holiday, and during a dark time for Jews, the Blumsteins said.

“We realized that the whole mission of the song was to very simply bring joy,” Elimelech Blumstein said.