Sidney Krum Jewish Music & Yiddish Theater Memorial Collections

The Sidney Krum Jewish Music and Yiddish Theater Memorial Collections span YIVO’s Music Archive and Sound Archive and also encompass a large number of collections in the general YIVO Archives.

Mr. Krum, a lawyer and teacher in the New York City schools, came to the United States as a child from the Polish town of Antipolia. He learned Yiddish folk songs from his mother, and throughout his life remained dedicated to his Jewish heritage, particularly its music.

The Krum Collections include the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings, which hold well over 15,000 78-rpm and LP recordings, piano rolls, CDs, and tapes of cantorial, folk, theater, and popular music in Yiddish and Hebrew, some unpublished. There are also humor recordings and recordings of recitations. Much of this material is in not in the holdings of the Library of Congress.

The collections also include printed sheet music and scores as well as unpublished manuscripts of scores and songs comprise at least 10,000 individual pieces of badkhn (wedding entertainer) repertory, folk songs, operettas, oratorios, popular songs, art songs, liturgical music, and instrumental music, much of it klezmer.

Theater collections include plays—in manuscript or in print with hand annotations—skits, programs, reviews, photographs, posters, and costumes. This material, along with the recordings, was produced in Europe, the Americas, and Israel. Its chronological span is from the 1890s through the present.

Examples of Sidney Krum Jewish Music and Yiddish Theater Memorial Collections received at YIVO in recent years are the records of the Hebrew Actors Union, and the papers of Leon Liebgold, May Simon, Leah Carey, Nellie Cassman, Marina Gordon (Soviet Yiddish songs), Yetta Zwerling, Tillie Rabinowitz, Cantor Gedalie Bargad, Thomas Sokoloff, Anatol Winogradoff, Gary Wagner (The Jewish Entertainment Hour television program), Betty Perlov, Cantor Raful Kaner, Gustav Berger and Fania Rubina, Miriam Walowit (Gilbert and Sullivan in Yiddish).