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Center for Jewish History: General Information
Lillian Goldman Reading Room
Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute
The core collection of the Sound Archive can be found by searching for RG 115: Sound Recordings in the Center's online catalog at search.cjh.org. Consisting of primarily commercial recordings, this collection contains close to 20,000 vinyls, as well as open reel and cassette tapes, piano rolls, record catalogs, and other related ephemera.
For quick access to the main catalog listing of RG 115: Sound Recordings, click HERE.
For quick access to individual listings within RG 115: Sound Recordings, click HERE.
YIVO Folksong Project (RG 2299)
This collection consists of an estimated 320 hours of 2,000 folksongs and oral histories from 75 informants who participated in the YIVO Folksong Project directed by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett from 1973-1975, under the auspices of YIVO. This collection is a one-of-a-kind, large-scale gathering of oral histories centered around traditional Yiddish music. The YIVO Folksong Project (YFP) collected for the first time Eastern European Jewish songs in their social context, as part of the exhaustive repertoire of the informants, and includes recordings from genres and groups which are rarely documented in scholarship: Purim folk dramas and parodies; traditional preachers and wedding jesters; learning tunes from religious primary schools; street singers and broadside ballads; songs from secular schools, political parties, and social movements; literary and musical circles; songs from the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust; accounts of the transmission of songs from Europe to America and vice versa.
You can access these recordings through the collection's finding aid.
Ben Stonehill Collection (RG 533)
Born in Poland in 1906, Ben Stonehill immigrated to Rochester, New York as a child, and moved to New York City in 1929. He was a dedicated zamler (collector of folklore) and after the Holocaust made it his mission to preserve the Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish music he feared was at risk of being forever lost. In 1948, he learned that the Hotel Marseilles in Manhattan was being used to house new refugees. He took a sales job at a wire-recorder dealership to obtain a demo recorder, then spent nearly every weekend of the summer of 1948 at the Hotel Marseilles, recording songs and stories from the refugees he met in the lobby. YIVO holds a portion this remarkable collection, which includes religious melodies, folk songs, pop songs, Zionist pioneer anthems, Soviet propagandist ballads, and what we would now call oral histories. You can visit the website of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, a close partner of the YIVO Sound Archive, to listen to the digitized collection.
Benedict Stambler Collection (RG 1014)
Benedict Stambler (1903-1967) founded the Collectors Guild record label, along with his wife Helen. The goal of the label was to convert Jewish 78 rpm records into LPs so they could be reissued for commercial sale. Beyond this project, his personal collection comprised some 4,000 records.
Ruth Rubin Collection (RG 620)
Ruth Rubin was a performer, folklorist, and musicologist who devoted her life to collecting and preserving Yiddish folklore. YIVO holds her collection of field recordings – over 2,500 songs recorded between 1946 and 1979 – as well as sound documents of Rubin’s lectures, concerts, and interviews. YIVO also stewards materials relating to her personal life, including personal notebooks, articles, correspondence, and Rubin’s never-published dissertation. The online home for the Ruth Rubin Legacy Archive of Yiddish Folksongs features digitized archival documents, recordings (including field recordings), and video, as well as playlists and reference materials for more research.
Oral History Collection on the Labor Movement (RG 113)
In 1963 the YIVO Institute sponsored an oral history project on the history of the Jewish community in America. Its objective was to carry out interviews on various themes with leaders and participants in the development of the American Jewish community and its institutions. The project's first theme was the American Jewish labor movement from the turn of the century to the period of the New Deal. The project director was Moses Kligsberg, sociologist and YIVO staff member. Forty-three persons were interviewed. The project lasted until 1968 but was not completed. The Sound Archive houses 43 recordings from the project as well as the administrative records of the project.
In addition to RG 115, the Sound Archive holds audio materials throughout the general YIVO archives. An overview of collections containing sound material is available in this section, grouped by the following themes:
To access the Sound Archive portions of these collections, you must make an appointment with the Sound Archive. Sound Archives staff have the right to restrict access to specific materials due to a variety of factors. Please email us at soundarchives@yivo.cjh.org or call the Archive at (212) 294-6169 to check the status of the materials you are interested in or to arrange a visit.
Yiddish Dialect Project Contains several hundred interviews with Jews from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North America, recorded by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich and her colleagues as part of the YIVO Dialect Project in 1948-1949.