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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: September 13, 2006 |
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The woman was in her 90s and about to move to a nursing home when Rhea Bertelli met her. The woman's husband had been a cantor who sang in synagogues, and her home was filled with records and sheet music of Hebrew and Yiddish songs. But the music was in danger of being lost.
"Her children were totally uninterested," said Bertelli, meaning the woman faced the prospect of having to throw out the entire collection. But instead the papers and records were donated to the Judaica Music Rescue Project at Florida Atlantic University, where Bertelli is a volunteer.
Bertelli, 81, said she and her fellow workers have many similar stories. Since the project started in 2002 they've gathered more than 9,000 records -- LPs, 45s and 78s -- as well as eight-track tapes, cassettes and other materials that offer a picture of the European immigrant experience in the United States in the last century.
The project's director, Nathan Tinanoff, says some institutions have donated large collections, but he also gets packages of records from around the country, sent by people cleaning out closets, garages or attics.
The Judaica Sound Archives now has about 60,000 songs, many in Yiddish, and has become one of the country's largest repositories of Jewish music. Organizers at the Florida archive and two smaller institutions in the Northeast say they're racing to save this past as the children or grandchildren of the original owners of the records are thinking about throwing out their musical inheritance.
"People say to me 'Why are we doing this? My kids don't care,"' Tinanoff said. "What we say is that if we don't preserve the music now, they'll never have the opportunity to determine if they do care. Maybe it will skip a generation and their grandchildren will really care about their heritage. If they do, we'll be there for them."
Maxine Schackman, the sound archives assistant director, said the collection also captures important history. She points to songs like "Roumania, Roumania," about immigrants remembering their homeland, and "Die Greene Cousine," about a woman who came to America expecting instant wealth and instead had to work in a factory. Others songs like a Yiddish translation of "Goodnight, Irene" and one called "Hot Dogs and Knishes" also recall the immigrant experience, she said.
"This is about the history of America and the history of Jews in America," Schackman said.
Florida's archive isn't the only effort to preserve Jewish sounds. A professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire started an online archive some four years ago; it now offers some 7,500 tracks. And the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has a collection of Yiddish music with some 3,000 songs.
Archive curators say saving the music can be difficult both because people may throw it out and because the materials on which the sound is recorded are deteriorating.
That's a challenge for Alex Hartov, who started the Dartmouth archive, and has rescued what music from 78 r.p.m records, tapes, and acetate disks of the 1930s and '40s.
"The vast majority of people couldn't care less" about what he's doing, Hartov said. But he added one fellow Dartmouth professor now uses the collection in his teaching, a practice Hartov hopes will expand.
Bob Freedman, who runs the archive at the University of Pennsylvania, says his collection is perfect for classrooms and he'll often use the music in workshops on history.
"I can do something on immigration, on folklore, language classes," he said. "It gives people who aren't Jewish a sense of the culture."
Freedman said he often gets messages from people asking about a song their grandfather may have sung or had a recording of. They may not remember the exact words, he said, but they want to find the song.
"The sense of loss comes right through the computer screen," Freeman said.
At the Florida archive volunteers have already put 1,000 of the oldest songs online and hope to add more. One advantage the Florida archive is its greater space and a large group of Jewish volunteers, Tinanoff said.
Volunteers across the country called "zamlers," Yiddish for someone who collects things, publicize the collection and take in musical donations. The archive has received material from 26 states, Tinanoff said.
He has been told the archive is like an "old age home for Jewish records." He said he views that as a compliment but prefers a more modern term -- an assisted living facility where the records aren't retired but are getting a new life.
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On the Net:
Judaica Sound Archives: http://faujsa.fau.edu/
Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~djsa/
Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music Archive at the University of Pennsylvania: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/freedman |
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