Based on recently discovered archival documents from Ukraine, this interactive lecture will discuss the story of how Moyshe Beregovski, one of the world’s leading ethnomusicologists of Yiddish music, conducted his ground-breaking project on collecting songs, stories, and jokes from Soviet Jewish Holocaust survivors in the 1940s. This lecture will focus on how Beregovski navigated Stalin’s Soviet Union in order to collect the world’s largest and earliest collection of Holocaust music in Europe. Also, for the first time, we will discuss how and why Beregovski got arrested, look at transcripts of his interrogations by the Soviet secret police, and look into what he did during his imprisonment in Stalin’s jails between 1950 and 1956.

Anna Shternshis holds the position of Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree (D.Phil) in Modern Languages and Literatures from Oxford University in 2001. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Author of over 20 articles in the field of Soviet Jewish history, culture and diaspora, she is currently working on a monograph on Yiddish Music in the Soviet Union during World War II. She is the co-editor-in-chief of East European Jewish Affairs. Shternshis created and directed a Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory project, together with an artist Psoy Korolenko, the initiative that brought back to life the forgotten Yiddish music written during the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. She lectures widely around the world and is a frequent guest on radio and TV shows worldwide (CBC, NPR, BBC, and more). Her work on Yiddish Glory, has been featured in printed media, TV and radio in over 40 countries. Ms. Shternshis will speak in Yiddish