In its fifth year, the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival is celebrating a birthday, but not its own. This season, the annual concert series celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. In conjunction with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh's "Israel@60" project, festival founder Aron Zelkowicz highlights the diversity of music in the country -- which often, and wrongly, he says -- is viewed as culturally removed from its region.

"This year showcases the incredible diversity of Israeli music," Zelkowicz says. "Israel is a melting pot of music: klezmer, Russian folk music, Arabic modes and Hebrew folk songs." And increasingly a melting pot of musicians, too. "There are musical groups comprised of Israelis and Palestinians," he says; the most famous is conductor Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, comprising Jews and Arabs from all over the Middle East.

And there's classical music, too, featured in the next concert, "Jerusalem of Gold," on the series.

Three Israeli soloists -- Gila Goldstein, piano, Nurit Pacht, violin, and Re'ut Ben-Ze'ev, soprano -- join the festival's orchestra for symphonic works by Israeli composers Paul Ben-Haim, Julius Chajes, and Noam Sheriff. "There are just so many great composers out there and it is all very different," says Zelkowicz of the wealth of contemporary classical music in a country known for one of the great interpreters of the standard repertory, the Israel Philharmonic.

Former PSO resident conductor and all-around talent Lucas Richman conducts the concert, which includes the Children's Festival Chorus joining in to sing Naomi Shemer's "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)" in an acclaimed arrangement. The version, by conductor Gal Alterovich, uses the popular song "as a musical window through which the city of Jerusalem is seen in different moments of its history."

The festival's final concert, "Israeli Songs and Dances," examines the musical history of modern-day Israel, dating to the 19th century.

"I wanted to find music that had the same optimistic spirit as those early pioneer songs," says Zelkowicz. "These songs have been developed since the late 1880s, when the first wave of immigrants came from Russia. It's a sampling to give the audience a taste of all the music that has been supported by [Israeli] musical identity."

Pacht will return and be joined by clarinetist Gilad Harel and local performers playing music of composers "who evoke the folk traditions of their homeland by combining Arabic, Yemenite, Hebraic and spiritual elements."

"We have a little bit of everything in that concert," says Zelkowicz.