Folk songs, Yiddish

This collection contains papers of Abraham Moshe Bernstein, a renowned cantor, choir master, composer of Jewish liturgical and secular music, music teacher, musicologist, writer, and translator. The bulk of the materials consists of Bernstein’s liturgical compositions and arrangements in both published and manuscript form, as well as a substantial collection of manuscripts and published works by various composers and arrangers. The materials include Hasidic folk songs and melodies, religious songs, Jewish hymns, popular songs, children’s songs, operettas, liturgical pieces, and musical exercises for students; choral volumes and partbooks; unidentified and fragmented musical manuscripts; manuscripts of Bernstein’s own writings; personal correspondence; a photo of Bernstein on his deathbed; secular and religious songs, Sabbath hymns, Hasidic folk songs and melodies, assembled by Bernstein for the S. Ansky Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society in Vilna.

Organized under the auspices of the National Jewish Welfare Board, the Jewish Music Council provides cultural programming through music, music reviews, lectures, bibliographies, an annual Jewish Music Festival and Jewish Week and Month. The Council also creates a bridge between Israeli and American Jewish music. Within the collection are articles, lectures, bibliographies, recording reviews, minutes, Jewish Music Festival material, handbooks, activity and progress reports, promotional flyers, programming manuals (including a manual on Ernest Bloch's music), and a 1949 Jewish songster.

The Music (Vilna Archives) collection comprises the music manuscripts of the Esther Rachel Kaminska Museum. This includes the instrument parts of various operettas, folk songs, and musical plays.

The Esther Rachel Kaminska Museum was established after the death of the artist in 1928 by her son-in-law Sigmund Turkow, and her daughter,Ida Kaminsky. Originally housed in the apartment of the deceasd in Warsaw, the Museum was transferred to the YIVO Institute in Vilna in 1927. In addition to the archives of the Kaminsky family, the Museum was augmented by music accessions of producer-playwright Nokhem Lipovsky, producer-director Elieser and Zina Rappel, and later by Norbert Glimer, M.L. Genfer, and others.

The Records of the YIVO Ethnographic Committee is a sub-group of Record Group 1, Records of YIVO - Vilna. The activities of the Ethnographic Committee consisted of collecting folklore materials, preparing and analyzing folklore questionnaires, corresponding with folklore collectors throughout the world, and maintaining a museum. This collection also includes surviving fragments of the collections of the S. Ansky Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society which was active in Vilna from 1920 until 1940, and of Invayskult, also known as the Jewish Bureau of the Belorussian Academy of Science in Minsk (founded in 1925 and dissolved in the 1930s). Record Group 1.2 includes both administrative files of the aforementioned institutions and folklore and historical materials, which were gathered in these institutions' archives.

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 (BKG) 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.