His mother, Bracha Zefira, was a popular singer of Yemenite Jewish origin and his father, Ben Ami Zilber, played the violin in the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.

[1] As both were busy with their international careers, they placed their son in a boarding school on kibbutz Gan Shmuel, where he lived from age four to fifteen.

[2][1] After losing part of a foot while playing with explosives in his room, he was expelled from the school and returned to his parents in Tel Aviv, where he began studying the trumpet.

His album "Ha'atalef Vehatarnigol" ("The Bat and the Rooster") included four Hasidic melodies composed by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh.

[4] According to Zilber, the title song is taken from a Talmudic analogy in which a rooster crows excitedly as a new day dawns while the bat lives in darkness.