Book presentation: Out of the Depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs

Bucharest Romania, 1945: a small team of Polish Jews gather in a house set up by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to support recently liberated survivors of the camps and ghettos. While compiling legal testimonies from those who come for food, provisions, and advice for safe places to resettle, they notate songs of wartime experience, which are collected and printed in a short run, and distributed to various people and organisations.

Sydney Australia, 2013: one of these fragile song books is found in the estate of a survivor in Sydney, preserved from deterioration by chance, gently pressed between pages of another music score. It is one of only 5 remaining copies in the world.

Thirteen years later, the songbook is reborn as Out of the Depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs. Dr Joseph Toltz and Associate Professor Anna Boucher have spent the last 13 years traveling four continents, investigating archives, tracing the stories of those who contributed to the original project. Critically acclaimed by James Loeffler (Johns Hopkins), Samuel Kassow (YIVO), Hasia Diner (NYU) and many other scholars, this event will launch the book in the USA. Similar to launches in Australia, the melodies of the songbook will be woven around the stories of the songs themselves. Joseph Toltz will be joined by Professor Michael Beckerman on piano for this special event.

This event is made possible by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Dr Joseph Toltz is an Australian academic specialising in Jewish music and its migrations. From 2014 to 2018, he was a Research Fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and a co-investigator on Performing the Jewish Archive, a four-year large grant funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2017, he curated Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music and Theatre at the University of Sydney, the fourth in a series of five international performance festivals held across the United States, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, South Africa and Australia.

A former Barbara and Richard Rosenberg Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Joseph is co-author of Out of the Depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs. Published by Manchester University Press in April 2026, the book has received critical acclaim from scholars of music and the Holocaust internationally.

Joseph is also a composer, arranger and active musician, working as a choral conductor and singer. His arrangement of Boas Bischofswerder’s Phantasia Judaica was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on 31 October 2024. His current research includes the Austrian-Jewish refugee composer Wilhelm Grosz, as well as the musical and dramatic works created by the Dunera Boys, a group of Jewish refugees deported from the United Kingdom and Singapore to internment camps in Australia in 1940.

In 2018, Joseph delivered the Al and Malka Green Lecture in Yiddish at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His work also extends to documentary film. Singing Up the Past: The Songs of Guta Goldstein, which he co-produced, premiered at the Jewish International Film Festival in Australia on 12 and 14 November 2024. Excerpts from the documentary were subsequently presented at the Ehemaliges Jüdisches Waisenhaus Pankow (former Jewish orphanage) in Berlin on 17 and 18 November 2025 as part of Jüdische Ossis III, curated by Benno Plassmann and Julia Herfurth of the Institut für Neue Soziale Plastik. The documentary received its New York premiere in April 2026 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and will be shown at the Washington DC JCC in November.

Details

When

Nov 5 — 5:30 PM

Location

Room 1230 - Schoenberg Music Building | UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

Price

Free with registration