Arts Correspondent

Etti Ankri is a psalmist for the 21st century. The award-winning Israeli lyricist and composer writes songs that shimmer with ancient mystical and biblical imagery, drawing from the wellspring of Torah and Kabbalah. Yet those very same music and lyrics pulsate with a contemporary beat, finding a place in the pantheon of Israeli pop music.

Ankri will perform her God-centered rock and pop at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in the District on Tuesday.

A frequent performer on television and in live concerts throughout Israel, Ankri tours the United States less often. For next week's concert, her Hebrew lyrics will be joined by projections in English for the many non-Hebrew speakers she expects, because the words matter as much as the music, she says. "It's important when people listen to my songs that they can enjoy a deeper understanding. I pay attention to the words [when I write] because the words serve as a key to the nefesh -- the soul. The words are something that open that door to a special place."

Among Israeli singer/songwriters, Ankri's story is familiar, even if the sound she has devised -- a cross between contemporary pop and chasidic mysticism, with a hearty dose of authentic Kabbalah -- is distinctive. She's no Madonna-like chameleon, nor a guitar-strumming folksinger for the old-school Israeli pioneers. Ankri blends rock, spirituality and a finely resonant voice into an intensely personal expression of her inner "soul life."

The Israeli-born performer grew up in Lod, outside of Tel Aviv, the daughter of a police officer and a stay-at-home mother, both immigrants from Tunis. Music, Ankri says, was part of her life since before she could remember.

"My mother and my grandmother always used to sing at home, my grandmother in Arabic," Ankri recently recalled from her home near Modi'in in Israel, where she lives with her husband and three children, ages 6, 11 and 15.

Writing music, she says, "is a way of behaving, it's my way to live. I must be creative. I can't live and not write music É it's my life."

Her first album, I See You in Your Eyes, went double platinum in Israel in 1990. In the years since, she has released six other albums, plus a best-of collection in 2005. She's working on two more: a children's album and a concept collection focusing solely on what Ankri calls "soul songs."

With a resonant voice and an eclectic sound, Ankri fuses cultures, continents and harmonies drawing from Eastern, Middle Eastern and Western influences.

One of her earliest songs, written when she was just 20, describes a mother waiting for her child who hasn't come home. "It's funny how I wrote such a song then," Ankri says, looking back. "My soul is old."

A chozeret be t'shuvah -- a returnee to Jewish religious observance -- Ankri has taken on religious strictures not typical for a performing artist, among them not performing on Shabbat.

"I came to be religious a few years ago," she says. "I believed always in God, even when I was very young, but as I studied and learned, I learned about the soul and the mind."

In "Yetziat Mitzrayim," or "Exodus from Egypt," Ankri sings of the biblical mass Exodus, but her lyrics -- "The Pharaoh might be within me/I might be enslaved within an old idea and weary of seeking, but I must keep on praying for the waters to open, the waters of life" -- contemporize this religious passage for 21st-century secular Israeli Jews, who may not have forged other spiritual or religious connections aside from the pop music they hear on the radio.

For Ankri, her music, which she describes as deeply personal, carries a message to all: secular and religious, observant and apostate.

She doesn't separate her religious life from her creative output as a songwriter and singer. Ankri's works express both Jewish imagination and a connection to the land of Israel, but she touches equally on issues prevalent in contemporary Israeli society: feminism, materialism, love and family relationships, war and peace.

"What's most important for me," she says, "is truth. I'm looking for truth in life and I don't see any conflict [with being religious]. É I understand that everyone today is singing about missing love, but what is that about, missing love? It's a love that comes from a very high place. This place is a relationship between the soul and God. In life that is what is the real thing."

Etti Ankri will perform Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in the District. Tickets, $10-$18, are available at www.washingtondcjcc.org or by calling 202-408-3100.