DRJM Archival Collections

A musical adventure of historic scope and proportion, the Milken Archive was founded in 1990 to document, preserve, and disseminate the vast body of music that pertains to the American Jewish experience. In the time since, the Milken Archive has become the largest collection of American Jewish music ever assembled—roughly 600 recorded works, more than 500 of them world premieres.

Additionally, the Milken Archive’s collection contains over 800 hours of oral histories, nearly 50,000 photographs and historical documents, thousands of hours of video footage from recording sessions, interviews, and live performances, and an extensive set of program notes and essays that illuminate the music’s historical and cultural context.

The Archive’s repertoire was determined by an editorial board comprised of notable composers, cantors, performers, and scholars, led by Neil W. Levin, Professor of Music at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a leading authority on Jewish music.

The Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) is a unit of FAU Libraries Special Collections department, located in the Wimberly Library on FAU’s Boca Raton campus.  Originally established in 2002 as a small project dedicated to the preservation of Jewish music, the RSA has matured into a robust digitization operation for all types of sound recordings.

In 2009 the RSA expanded to include Jazz recordings (collection donated by Dr. Henry Ivey) and early American vintage recordings (collection donated by the estate of Jack Saul).

The RSA holds over 100,000 recordings of various types, all of which have been donated to the Wimberly Library by individuals and organizations committed to the preservation of sound recordings as cultural and historic artifacts.

The Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings is unique in its comprehensive scale and scope. The over 9,800 78rpm discs include Yiddish theater, popular and traditional music, cantorial songs, klezmer music, poetry, drama, and event ballads and from locations as diverse as the United States, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa and Israel. The contents offer an unparalleled audio entrée into the vibrant, fascinating cultural practices of early- mid 20th century Yiddish life.

Sherry Mayrent, collector and musician, gives an engaging account of the collection’s origin and its educational and cultural potential in this video interview.

The Mills Music Library and General Library System gratefully acknowledge Ms. Mayrent’s generosity in donating this unique collection. The Marinus and Minna B. Koster Foundation, the Littauer Foundation and Ms. Mayrent have generously provided essential support for cataloging, access, and preservation.

In partnership with the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture, the collection will include:

• Catalog record – with Yiddish, Hebrew script, translated title(s)
• Label image
• Digital audio – remastered and speed corrected
• Sheet music (when available).

Languages represented on the discs are principally Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and English. The database record include titles, names and other information as it appears on the disc labels. For non-English titles, we created an English translation if one did not appear on the disc. Non-English title information is also presented in transliterated form (a phonetic approximation using the Latin alphabet). The transliteration scheme is from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Please note that this is a long-term project! For questions and access to recordings not yet represented online, please contact the Mills Music Library.

The Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive at Penn is among the most important resources in the world for the study of Jewish culture, folklore, history, linguistics, and literature through the medium of sound. The Freedmans built the collection as a labor of love over the course of more than six decades and in 1998 donated it to the Penn Libraries. They continue to develop the collection and serve as ambassadors of its contents fielding questions from around the world.

The Archive contains musical recordings from around the globe in over a dozen different languages. It is particularly strong in its holdings of Yiddish folk and art songs, as well as liturgical, theatrical, vaudeville, and klezmer music. As a sound archive, the collection also includes field recordings, personal sound recordings, and readings of Yiddish literature by some of the great writers and actors of the 20th century.

Among the most important features of the archive is a database of over 40,000 individual songs which are keyword searchable through the Penn Libraries’ website. Constructed over four decades, this online discovery tool makes the Freedman Jewish Sound Archive an invaluable research destination for scholars, students, performers, composers, and the general public and has been acknowledged in many films, plays, audio albums, musical programs, and books. Faculty at Penn regularly bring their students to learn about the Freedman archive and show them how to research how a folk song may be transformed into a theater piece and then into an anthem of survival in ghettos and concentration camps. The database is an unrivaled tool for finding a particular musician’s recordings or locating biblical or political references in songs.

There are currently 5,923 albums in the Freedman collection. The recordings include 78, 45, and 33 rpm vinyl recordings; reel to reel and cassette tapes; video cassettes, primarily from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and the U.S., one video cassette from Poland, as well as CDs and DVDs. There are no early cylinder recordings in the collection. The vast majority of the recordings are commercially released and under copyright but there are a few field recordings, friends of the Freedmans taping songs, a documentary by Robert Freedman’s mother describing her journey to America, a tape of Camp Boiberik songs, and tapes of Molly Freedman’s mother singing songs. New sound recordings in all formats are actively collected.

In addition to the sound collection, “ancillary files” include printed books, sheet music, and ephemera. There are currently 500 volumes in the print collection and 1,510 pieces of sheet music including all of the compositions (all classical) of Helen Medeweff Greenberg, which she gave to the Archive before she died. There are also myriad dance folios, and other publications for instrumentalists (none of which have been catalogued). The ephemera file consists of items not likely to be noticed or preserved, mostly from periodicals and the internet, cross-referenced to a song, album, personality, etc. in the database. There are some 2,000 items catalogued in ephemera. Many are letters from readers of the Yiddish American newspaper the Forverts of the column titled “Leyners Demonen Lider” (Readers Remember Songs). They show how the column functions as a kind of public reference service in which readers would request a song be identified, or a variant of a song, the text of a song or share any other relevant observation, hoping to gain the attention of the columnists, Yiddish song experts, researchers, and educators who would favor them with a response.

This impressive compilation offers a nearly complete listing of sound recordings made by American minority artists prior to mid-1942. Organized by national group or language, the seven-volume set cites primary and secondary titles, composers, participating artists, instrumentation, date and place of recording, master and release numbers, and reissues in all formats. Because of its clear arrangements and indexes, it will be a unique and valuable tool for music and ethnic historians, folklorists, and others.