{"id":124486,"date":"2026-05-22T10:57:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T14:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/?p=124486"},"modified":"2026-05-22T12:13:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:13:07","slug":"interview-dr-anna-shternshis-talks-yiddish-glory-silenced-songs-world-war-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2026\/05\/22\/interview-dr-anna-shternshis-talks-yiddish-glory-silenced-songs-world-war-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"INTERVIEW | Dr. Anna Shternshis Talks About Yiddish Glory, The Silenced Songs of World War II"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Vocalist
Vocalist Psoy Korolenko and the ensemble performing Yiddish Glory, The Silenced Songs of World War II (Photo courtesy of the artists)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The release of Yiddish Glory, The Silenced Songs of World War II, in April on the Six Degrees Records label, actually began several decades ago with an incredible story.<\/p>\n

During the 1940s, ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky<\/strong> (1892 \u2013 1961) led a group of scholars in the discovery of a collection of songs that had been written by a wide range of people who had witnessed the horrors of World War II in Eastern Europe and Russia. It included pieces by Jewish Red Army soldiers, refugees, victims and survivors of Ukrainian ghettos, including a 10 year old orphan, a teenager prisoner of a concentration camp, and many more.<\/p>\n

Their voices reconstructed history, and revealed truths that can only come from first person accounts.<\/p>\n

In 1944, while the war still raged on, Beregovsky presented his project on the history of Jewish instrumental music, the first ever dissertation on Jewish music. He received his degree from the Moscow State Conservatory, and returned to Kyiv not long after. There, from 1936 to 1949, Beregovsky he was head of the Office for Musical Ethnography in Kyiv.<\/p>\n

However, under the Soviets, Russia\u2019s stance on Jews had changed. In 1949, the Office for Musical Ethnography was eliminated, and Beregovsky was fired. On August 18, 1950, he was arrested and accused of Jewish nationalist activity. He, and eventually most of his colleagues, was convicted and deported to the Ozerlag camp in the Irkutsk region for a ten year sentence. Paroled in March 1955 because of ill health, Moisei took up his work again, but could not find a publisher in Russia \u2014 despite the fact that he petitioned for, and received, rehabilitation from the charge with the support of people like Dmitri Shostakovich.<\/p>\n

He died in 1961 thinking his work would fall into the forgotten crevices of history.<\/p>\n

\"From
From the album booklet: researcher and scholar Moisei Beregovsky and some of the work he collected (Photo: Six Degrees Records)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was only by coincidence that Yiddish Professor Anna Shternshis<\/strong>, Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, rediscovered this cache of music in Kyiv that had, incredibly, survived the decades since the group of researchers had been arrested and imprisoned. The documents, some typed and many handwritten, were fragile, and she worked quickly to preserve them. Some included lyrics, music and melodies, while others were simply lyrics scribbled onto whatever scraps of paper could be found at the time.<\/p>\n

Toronto producer Dan Rosenberg assembled an ensemble of musicians and vocalists from the worlds of classical, folk and jazz. The first album of works from this incredible collection of music was released in 2018 to wide acclaim, including a GRAMMY nomination.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year the follow up album, Yiddish Glory, The Silenced Songs of World War II, dives deeper into this musical archive. The music, some of it newly written for songs that only existed as lyrics, is written in a range of styles from Eastern European klezmer to classical-adjacent.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery song on this album is controversial,\u201d explains Shternshis in a statement. \u201cSome tell stories of illegal border crossings, others condemn fellow ghetto prisoners for corruption, while still others uncover stories of betrayal by former friends and neighbours who became prison guards instead of companions. Each song contains secrets, because singing them out loud could lead to jail sentences. Yet each song is also a testament to the fact that some people who lived through what they lived to, have simply refused to be silent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yom Kippur Without Fascists (1945) is a satirical song that was written in Almaty, Kazakhstan by an anonymous Jewish refugee in celebration of the end of World War II. In it, the writer calls for the death of Hitler, who he describes as a \u201ckapore\u201d or sacrificial chicken of Yom Kippur.<\/p>\n

The lyrics were collected by I. Merzon in Almaty, Kazakhstan, 1945. The music was composed by Psoy Korolenko and Drew Jurecka.<\/p>\n

Performed by Rebekah Wolkstein, Violin; Drew Jurecka, Bandoneon and Clarinet; Joe Phillips, Bass; Robert Horvath, Piano.<\/p>\n