Lost Holocaust music, nearly erased by Stalin, goes on tour in Asia

A trove of 263 Yiddish songs, collected in Ukraine just after World War II, is being brought to a global audience through a new album and international tour. These songs, rescued from the Holocaust, were nearly erased by Soviet repression.

Moisei Beregovsky, a Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist, recorded the music from Jewish communities in Ukraine after liberation from Romanian occupation in 1944. However, his work was interrupted when he was arrested in 1950, accused of "Jewish nationalism," and sent to a gulag. His collection was confiscated, and the music remained lost until librarians discovered it in the basement of Ukraine’s Vernadsky National Library in Kyiv in the 1990s.

Now, one of these rediscovered songs, "Dear Mama," which tells the story of a child singing about his mother's death in the Bershad ghetto, is featured on the album "Yiddish Glory: The Silenced Songs of World War II." Compiled by Anna Shternshis, a professor of Yiddish and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, the album features 15 songs and was released in April by Six Degrees Records. Shternshis took the album on tour in May, performing concerts in Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing. She also published a complementary book, "Postwar Life, Hopes, and Fears."

Shternshis' research revealed that "Dear Mama" is not a literal account of life in the Bershad ghetto, where thousands died of hunger and disease. Instead, she believes the song represents a fantasy of a dignified death, a "prayer" for the empathy and burial that were impossible under occupation. "One of the biggest traumas that people had in the Bershad ghetto was that no one would notice the death," Shternshis told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "So the song that did talk about the lack of empathy, but also talked about the funeral, was actually a fantasy that all these things would happen, a prayer, a grave."

This is Shternshis' second "Yiddish Glory" album. Her first, released in 2018, was nominated for a Grammy and also focused on Holocaust testimonies from the Soviet Union, stemming from Beregovsky's rediscovered documents.

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One of the biggest traumas that people had in the Bershad ghetto was that no one would notice the death. So the song that did talk about the lack of empathy, but also talked about the funeral, was actually a fantasy that all these things would happen, a prayer, a grave.