Tzruya ‘Suki’ Lahav Dead, 1970s Member of E Street Band Dies at 74

Israeli violinist and vocalist Tzruya “Suki” Lahav, who briefly toured with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in the mid-1970s, has died from cancer at age 74. According to a Facebook post from son Yonatan Albalak, Lahav died on Wednesday (April 1), with Albalak writing, “my beloved and beautiful mother, Zeruya Lahav was gathered into infinity after a short and hard battle with the cursed disease. She wrote songs that touched people’s hearts. She was a special woman, smart, pure in heart and loving life. She was the best mom I could ever ask for.”

A beloved poet, author, lyricist, musician, actress and singer in her native Israel, Lahav was introduced to Springsteen in 1972, when her husband, recording engineer Louis Lahav, worked on the rocker’s 1973 major label debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. The following year, she contributed backing vocals to “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “Incident on 57th Street” from The Boss’ sophomore album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.

According to Rolling Stone, Lahav was pressed into service on the album after a church choir Springsteen hired didn’t show up and the future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and his producers overdubbed layers of her vocals to turn her into a one-woman choir, not originally crediting her contribution in the LP’s liner notes.

During the summer of 1974, Springsteen put an ad in the Village Voice looking for a new drummer, pianist, trumpet player and violinist after drummer Ernest “Boom Carter” and keyboardist David Sancious quit the band. Their replacements came in the form of longtime E Street stalwarts drummer Max Weinberg and keyboardist Roy Bittan, as well as Lahav, who was hired on a trial basis at first.

Her first show with the band took place on Oct. 4, 1974 at Avery Fisher Hall in New York and she performed with the group from then through March 1975, with her final show coming on March 3, 1975 at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. before she and her husband moved back to Israel, according to RS.

Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper wrote that Lahav was a beloved, award-winning multimedia artist in her native country, where she was known for writing songs for some of the nation’s most popular acts, including Gidi Gov (“Perach”), Rami Kleinstein (“Al Hagesher Hayashan”), Yehudit Ravitz (“Yemei Hatom”) and many others.

Lahav was born in on the northern Israeli kibbutz Ayelet HaShanar on July 16, 1951 and served in the Israeli Defense Forces’ paratroopers brigade entertainment troupe. After returning following her stint in the E Street Band, she appeared on the first and only album by the influential rock band Tamouz, 1975’s Sof Onat Hatapuzim.

“I felt like a complete outsider,” Lahav told the paper in 2023 about her time with Springsteen’s band. “Beloved, respected, with the guys, but really a character from another planet. And yet, to be part of great art is a huge thing.” She may have felt like she didn’t quite fit, but Lahav said she picked up crucial lessons on songwriting from the future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. “What I took from him was the understanding that when you write songs for music, you can soar,” she said. “Soar with the text. You don’t have to stick to some limiting coherence; you can just soar. You can and should.”

Before moving back to Israel after her E Street stint, Lahav studied acting at the renowned Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in Los Angeles and went on to act in several musicals and plays in Israel and briefly joined the band Habreira Hativit before putting musical performance behind her and focusing on writing poetry and prose. In addition to two novels, she wrote the screenplay for the 1996 crime drama Kesher Dam.