We will observe Yom HaShoah this year with a screening and discussion of the film Song Searcher.
Song Searcher is a historical documentary film made in 2019-2021 that recounts the true life story of Moyshe Beregovsky, a man who saved the Yiddish musical heritage of Ukraine.
Following in the great ethnographer, Moyshe Beregovsky’s footsteps around Ukraine, and using heartbreaking testimony of the few survivors remaining, the film reveals the tragic fate of the places where he collected his music before the war, and of the people who played and sang for him. These old Jewish communities were destroyed by the Nazis but their melodies miraculously survived in Beregovsky’s archive, even though he himself was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in the Stalinist gulag. This incredible archive, published decades after his death, has become a source of reference and interpretation for dedicated klezmer musicians around the world, reviving the centuries-old European klezmer tradition that was almost entirely destroyed by the Shoah.
We will also raise funds to support the Klezmer Institute, the organization that has been working to to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music and has done the essential work of digitizing the Beregovsky archive to make the music accessible to musicians around the world. The institute is close to finishing Phase II of the Klezmer Archive Project and, in this recent wave of funding cuts, has just had its NEH grant funding cancelled. We can honor those who perished tragically and help continue the work of keeping the music alive.