How the NY Public Library acquired a ‘treasure trove’ of Jewish and Yiddish music

A collection of documents described as a treasure trove of Jewish music has been acquired by the New York Public Library, after being hidden in a cantor’s basement in Yonkers for 40 years. 

Sheet music, manuscripts and orchestral arrangements for close to 4,000 musical works — including cantorial music, Hasidic melodies, Yiddish theater, klezmer and opera — that were performed live on the radio station WEVD between 1927 and 1995 are now part of NYPL’s Dorot Jewish Division, which celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2022. 

Before it went off the air for good in 2001, WEVD — which billed itself as “the station that speaks your language” — was owned by The Forward Association, publisher of the Yiddish newspaper Forverts as well as its English-language counterpart, The Forward. For much of the station’s 70-year history, it was known for its Jewish programming. Among the composers and arrangers who worked at WEVD over the decades were the “big four” of Yiddish theater: Abraham Ellstein, Alexander Olshanetsky, Joseph Rumshinsky and Sholom Secunda.

“The radio station, in a way, is a history of Jewish music and the Jewish people in the United States,” said Lyudmila Sholokhova, a musicologist who is the curator at the NYPL’s Dorot Jewish Division. “WEVD had its own community, and this collection shows that it spoke to all tastes and all generations of that community.”

Items that would eventually fill 38 boxes were preserved by David Shiff, a retired cantor who served at the Midchester Jewish Center in Yonkers for nearly 50 years. Shiff began working at the station somewhere around 1953 and had a 15-minute show on the station on Friday afternoons. There, he began the tradition of announcing the Shabbat candle-lighting times.

In the early 1980s, when the station was preparing to move from 58th Street to Lower Broadway in the East Village, Shiff learned of plans to throw away the documents, so he began taking cartons of material home. His then-teenage son Gary helped with the schlepping, and his daughter, Toby, organized the material in filing cabinets and plastic tubs. The collection — now named The David and Ina Shiff WEVD Music Collection — then sat in Shiff’s basement for four decades. 

Hankus Netsky, the Boston-based klezmer band leader and educator learned of the existence of the WEVD collection in 2019 from David Reinhold, a Bobover Hasid in Borough Park who collects Jewish music. Netsky, in turn, tried to interest the Yiddish Book Center and the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, but said they declined. Netsky then alerted Sholokhova. 

In April 2022 Sholokhova came up to Yonkers with her colleague Meryem-Khaye Siegel to see the collection and the two scholars immediately realized the scope and historical significance of the material. In October 2022 the library decided to acquire it. The library did not spend anything to acquire the collection, but it is expected to be costly to process.

At the NYPL’s main branch on Wednesday, Nov. 13, there will be an hour-long celebration of the acquisition. It will feature a panel discussion with Yiddish music experts including Netsky, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Henry Sapoznik. A vocal quartet and cantorial soloists accompanied by a seven-piece band led by Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene, will perform musical works from the archive. Tickets for “WEVD and the Sounds of Jewish New York” are sold out but the event will be live-streamed here.

“The sound of radio is very important but [this collection] is no less important,” said Sholokhova. “And in a way [the documents] are more detailed.”

Among the treasures in the archive is original music composed by Sholem Secunda, a giant of Yiddish popular music, that is based on the poem “Fun farsheydene yorn” (“From various years”) by post-war Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. Secunda, who penned the Yiddish classics “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon” and “Dona, Dona,” wrote the music in a WEVD studio. It’s believed to be the last piece he wrote. 

Another gem is a Yiddish translation and musical notation for the “Un di felice eterea” aria in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” According to the station’s records, the aria was performed on WEVD in 1963, 1964 and 1965. 

Mlotek, 73, said one of his seminal childhood memories involves a live musical performance before 50 to 75 people at WEVD’s West 46th Street studio. For a boy who was not much older than 10 at the time, the atmosphere was electric.

“I grew up speaking Yiddish and hearing my parents singing Yiddish with their friends,” he recalled. “Being in a professional radio station with professional musicians and professional singers performing this stuff was thrilling to me.This was radio happening on the spot in front of my eyes.”

Starting in 1927, when the station was started by the Socialist Party of America, WEVD had a house orchestra with as many as 16 pieces. The ensemble shrunk to a quartet and, by the time Mlotek served as the last music director of “The Forward Hour” in the late 1970s, there was just a pianist or two, he said. As the Yiddish-speaking audience diminished, the station leased time to outside organizations whose programming had nothing to do with the Jewish community,

Sapoznik, a leader of the klezmer revival who has written and lectured about the history of Yiddish radio, was tapped to be the last host and producer of “The Forward Hour” in 1990 until it went off the air in 1995. 

Netsky made four trips to Shiff’s home before the New York Public Library retrieved the WEVD files in August 2023. As he thumbed through the large plastic containers, Netsky recalled, he marveled at the variety of documents that lay within.

“You’d see an arrangement for chamber orchestra of klezmer tunes done by Sam Medoff, who was Perry Como’s musical director, and then the next thing in the folder might be a Yiddish version of a patriotic song, like Leibele Waldman’s ‘Ich dank dir Got far America,’” or “Thank You God for America,” he said. 

Netsky said he thinks the Yiddish theater music in the archive files is particularly valuable because it was maligned by the classical composers as shund (trash) and neglected.

“This is a whole world of music,” Netsky said. “It doesn’t sound like other music, and this is a piece of that puzzle that was not available to us before.”

Netsky noted the irony of the WEVD material being thrown out in the early 1980s — just as the klezmer and Yiddish culture revival was taking off.

“At precisely the time when the station had decided to discard this [material], younger people were saying, ‘Hey, what happened to our ethnic heritage? Where is our ethnic music?’” he said. “We found 78s, and that’s how we started a resurgence of this culture, but we didn’t find this. We did not find scores.”

Now, scholars and others will have access to this detailed musical documentation, which Sholokhova estimated will take about two years to catalog. Because of copyright issues, there are no plans to digitize the collection, she added. 

Sholokhova called Shiff, 89, a hero for rescuing the radio station’s performance library.

“It meant something to me,” Shiff said of the WEVD documents. “I believe music is like heylike sforim (holy books). You can’t get rid of it.”

Holding on to the WEVD papers, he added, “is the smartest thing I did in my life.”

“WEVD and the Sounds of Jewish New York” will be live streamed from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. on Nov. 13.