Israel's best-selling singer ever - with 37 songs topping the national charts - didn't expect her latest release, My Joys, to become another top seller. Rita sings all the songs in her mother tongue - Farsi. But in just a few short weeks, the release broke through late last year. But she was even more surprised, shocked even, when she began getting messages and emails from Iran, where My Joys became an underground hit late last year. Iranians download it via illegal Internet connections, buy bootleg versions on the black market and pass along handmade CDs in secret.

"From the country that wants to destroy us," she said last week from her home in Tel Aviv, acknowledging the irony of the situation. "I learned that what I did was much, much bigger than what I intended. It is really something special to understand that there is a huge wall between [Israel and Iran] but music can reach out and can show us the real things between us - the simplest things, like love."

The sensuous, sexy Israeli singer, with a lush mane of black hair, has topped the pop charts there for the past 25 years. Next week, Rita - like Cher or Madonna, she's such a superstar that one name will suffice - brings her show to Bethesda's Music Center at Strathmore where she'll share some of her favorites from her quarter-century singing and performing career in Israel, along with selections from Our Joys, her newest album of Persian favorites that she was weaned on as a child.

Born in Tehran, Rita Jahan-Foruz as she is known outside the music and pop culture worlds, emigrated with her family to Israel when she was 8. Her memories of Iran have faded, but they still influence her and color her world. "I remember there were so many beautiful places, Iran has an amazing landscape and many, many amazing places," she said. Rita, 50, recalls her father's ancestral home in Isfahan with its mirrored party room used for family celebrations and holidays.

While her family left nine years before the Shah fell, even then anti-Semitism was evident, if subtle. "In our neighborhood where we lived, our parents told us not to say that we were Jewish," Rita recalled. "We learned in Muslim schools, and they didn't know that we were Jews."

Our Joys, her Persian album, came about unexpectedly. The singer was at work on what she thought and hoped would be a world music album, maybe drawing from music traditions from throughout the Middle East. But every time she'd get into the studio, she kept returning to the songs she heard in childhood.

"My mother had an amazing voice and she could have been a great singer because she was so beautiful," Rita said, "but it was inappropriate for a woman to be a singer in those days. So all of her love of singing and music came out only at home."

She recalls her mother singing all the time, while cooking or doing housework or taking care of the family. And for family celebrations, her mother would perform. "These were the things that I grew up on: her warm voice in the home and in our celebrations, at sad times and happy times. This is what I took with me and this record is the music of my childhood, my family," Rita said.

Those songs, many that Rita pulled from a bag of CDs her mother carried with her from Tehran, were the soundtrack of her childhood. "What I can remember is not specific things, but colors, tastes, smells, a lot of feelings that you still have in your memory," Rita said, and those songs.

She said she tried translating the Farsi lyrics into Hebrew, but it just didn't feel right. Instead she took a risk on releasing an Israeli recording entirely sung in the language of one of Israel's sworn enemies. Among the tracks is the boisterous "Shah Doomad," a celebratory song that she grew up hearing her mother sing at weddings and henna and mikvah parties before the marriage celebration. Then there's "Shane," another song her mother loved to sing. Meaning comb, the original arrangement Rita heard on her mother's CD used a hair comb in the instrumentation. She does the same in her version, which is arranged in a contemporary fusion of gypsy, pop and Middle Eastern rhythms. "I really love that this song has such poetic lyrics," she said. "It says, 'Don't comb your hair too much because my heart builds a house inside of your hair and when you comb it, you wound my heart and I bleed.' It's so very romantic."

Joining Rita at Strathmore will be a nine-member ensemble of some of Israel's top musicians playing contemporary and traditional instruments. She said that they are among Israel's most important musical artists, each with a solo career. Rita's shows, especially in Israel, are known for their spectacular special effects - dancers, aerialists, acrobats, jugglers, laser light shows. Her latest, My Joys, on its North American tour may not be as eye-popping, but it is her most personal. In fact, on last year's album, you can hear her 20-year-old daughter singing back up.

But after she finished recording it, she realized something was missing. "I realized it cannot be without the voice of my mother," Rita said, "because she is the reason, the inspiration." She returned to the studio with her mother and they recorded the opening track together.

Rita will perform My Joys on Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda. Tickets, at $40-$75, are available by calling 301-581-5100 or visit www.strathmore.org.