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April 22, 2005/Nisan 13 5765, Volume 57, No. 34
Archive preserves legacy of old Jewish recordings
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
One by one, the Jewish sounds of yesteryear are being rescued from the dusty basements, attics and garages of today.
Working on the fifth floor of Florida Atlantic University's main library in Boca Raton, Fla., a team of mostly volunteers is meticulously cleaning, digitalizing, indexing and preserving thousands of vintage records in an unique effort to rescue the voices and music that flowed from the immigrant neighborhoods of the United States in the first half of the 20th century.
The effort is a race against time.
As members of the older generation die, their baby-boomer sons and daughters - raised on the sounds of the Beatles rather than the Yiddish or cantorial numbers of an earlier era - often throw out the records they stumble across as they clean out their parents' homes.
"The most important thing is to rescue the records before they are thrown in the trash," says Nathan Tinanoff, director of the newly created Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University Libraries.
Tinanoff, a retired engineer, launched the Judaica Music Rescue Project in the summer of 2002 after volunteering his technical expertise to help a retired New York cantor preserve the 750 78-rpm records that were a part of the university's Molly Fraiberg Judaica Collection. When the cantor, Asher Herman, died, Tinanoff, who did not know anything about the music he was helping preserve, decided to continue the project.
"The more you listen to the music - you can't not love it," Tinanoff says. "It touches your heart."
The collection holds music recorded in many formats. In total, including duplicates, the collection has more than 15,000 78s, most of which were produced in the United States. It also includes 2,500 LP albums, 700 cassette tapes and 300 45s. Altogether it has more than 40,000 songs, instrumentals and spoken-word pieces - comedy, poetry and theatrical recordings.
Florida Atlantic is well positioned to look for donations of records because it is "geographically blessed," Tinanoff says. Because it is in South Florida, the project can tap into the region's huge pool of Jewish retirees, many of whom speak Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, German and other languages heard on the records.
In addition to nearly three dozen local volunteers who come to the library to help clean records, enter information into the database or scan the colorful record labels, the project has a network of zamlers, Yiddish for collectors, who scour the United States, Canada and Israel for records to be donated.
The rescue effort not only receives donations from the zamlers and other individuals, including Art Raymond, who had a popular Jewish music program on WEVD radio station in New York, but from major organizations as well. The National Yiddish Book Center has donated more than 6,000 78s during the past two years and has agreed to steer any future donations to the archive.
As part of this effort to create "the Library of Congress of Jewish music," as Maxine Schackman, the archive's assistant director, described it, the archive has just finalized an agreement with the Feher Jewish Music Center of the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv, the Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archives at the University of Pennsylvania and the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive to establish the Alliance for the Preservation of Jewish Sound, which would create the largest indexed and publicly accessible collection of Jewish music in the world.
The idea is to allow someone sitting at a listening station at any one of the institutions - or someone sitting at home, surfing the Internet - to tap into the database's vast resources. Once the alliance is created and its structures are in place, Tinanoff hopes to include other universities that have their own music collections.
Beyond creating a resource for researchers, Tinanoff said
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