Shalom Aleichem (Hebrew: שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם, 'Peace be upon you') is a traditional song sung by many Jews every Friday night upon returning home from synagogue prayer.
The custom of singing "Shalom Aleichem" on Friday night before Eshet Ḥayil and Kiddush is now nearly universal among religious Jews.
Elijah of Vilna (1720–1789) worried about the phrasing and warned singers to be careful not to pause between elyon, Most High, and mee-melech, from the king.
Rabbi Jacob Emden, in his prayerbook, Bet El (1745), criticized the use of the hymn on the grounds that supplications on the Sabbath and supplications to angels were inappropriate and the hymn's grammar—arguing that the inclusion of the prefix מִ at the beginning of every second line (i.e., mee-melech) was bad form, as it rendered the passage, "angels of the Most High, away from the King who rules over kings".
He, therefore, deleted that מִ, thereby reducing mi-melech to melech, and that deletion has been emulated in some other prayerbooks (a small minority) such as Seligman Baer's Siddur Avodat Yisroel (1868), the Orot Sephardic, and Koren's Mizrahi (but not Koren's Ashkenaz or Sefard) prayerbook, although it makes the musical meter a bit awkward.
The slow, well-known melody for the song was composed by the American composer and conductor Rabbi Israel Goldfarb on May 10, 1918, while sitting near the Alma Mater statue in front of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and first published later that year as "Sholom Aleichem—שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם" in Friday Evening Melodies by Israel and his brother Samuel.
I. Goldfarb wrote in 1963, "The popularity of the melody traveled not only throughout this country but throughout the world, so that many people came to believe that the song was handed down from Mt.
A modern, exuberantly joyful version of this melody has been popularized by Idan Yaniv and Kinderlach; it was released in September 2009.