Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive

About the Archive

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 Israel, the U.S., and the former Soviet Union; one video cassette from Poland; and many 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 some are not. These include field recordings, songs recorded by friends of the Freedmans, 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” in the collection 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 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, crossed referenced to a song, album, personality, or other keyword found 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.

The Archive Today

The Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive continues to be an active and growing collection used by a wide variety of patrons in a multitude of ways. First and foremost, it is used by students and academics as a reference library for their various fields of interest, including language and linguistics, literature, musical style, immigration, Eastern European Studies, and folklore. It is a source for those interested in the Jewish musical literature of the 19th and 20th centuries and contains a wealth of material of significant interest to scholars of Yiddish literature.

The Archive was a founding member of the Alliance of Judaica Sound Archives (JSA), formed for the purpose of furthering the goals of collecting, preserving, and promoting the cultural legacy contained in Judiaca sound recordings. The other founding members are Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University Libraries (FAU) and the Feher Jewish Music Center of Beth Hatfutsot (Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora) at Tel Aviv University (FJMC). The goal of the Alliance is to establish an internet based closed network among its members to permit access to the sound recordings and other information in their respective collections.

Links have been established with JSA so that sound recordings at FAU may be accessed by visitors to the Archive. assuming that the recording is in the Archive database. Additionally, visitors to the FAU website may access the background information in the Freedman Archive with respect to a recording at FAU.

The Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive provides a music reference service. Queries have been received from Alaska to Uzbekistan, from performers, composers, clergy, educators, choral directors, music therapists, audio, video and film producers, authors, and representatives of various libraries, academic, and research institutions. Most interesting are the requests from individuals requesting that a song or prayer sung by a parent or grandparent from just a fragment or phrase which remained in memory.

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the artists and other copyright holders in granting the Freedmans permission to reproduce the materials in this section. Special thanks are due to Joseph and Eleanor Mlotek and the Workmen's Circle for permission to use texts, translations, and music from their three collections of Yiddish songs: Mir Trogn a Gezang! (The New Book of Yiddish Songs), 1972; Pearls of Yiddish Song, 1988; and Songs of Generations: New Pearls of Yiddish Song, [no date]. Further reproduction of any of this material requires the consent of the copyright holders.

The Founders

Natives of the Philadelphia area, Robert (Bob) and Molly Freedman established the Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries in 1998. Bob graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1954 and practiced law for over 50 years. Molly Freedman (nee Crasner) died on June 16, 2022. Molly had a 20-year career as a social worker at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the Jewish Family Service at the David Neuman Senior Center in northeast Philadelphia.

Both were raised in immigrant homes in which English was co-equal with Yiddish. They were exposed to the rich cultural content imparted by the afternoon Jewish schools and summer camps they attended. Their homes resonated with Hebrew and Yiddish songs sung by parents, family, and friends long before the hootenanny was in style. 

"Molly and I associate the music with happy childhood memories, festive occasions, and family. I have memories of my parents and their friends singing together in a tiny, crowded living room in our home," Bob recalled. Molly remembered with fondness her mother singing Yiddish and Russian songs while doing household chores, and her father often playing recordings of Yiddish concerts and art songs.

The collection had its beginnings early in their marriage when Molly suggested that they should buy a few recordings. Shortly thereafter, they decided to build a collection by acquiring recordings wherever they traveled. Their efforts began at a time in which Yiddish as a living language and culture seemed to be ebbing — but that soon changed. Sometime in the middle or late 1970’s, at the cusp of the “klezmer revival,” researchers began to visit the Freedman’s. By that time the collection had outgrown the space available in the Freedman home.

The first person to use the collection was a 16-year old Gratz College student who wrote a paper on Holocaust songs. Bob was then asked to bring some of the music to a Jewish folklore class at Penn, which subsequently developed into an annual visit by Yiddish language classes to the Freedman’s apartment. In 1981, Bob bought his first computer and began to list the recordings. He subsequently developed the first Yiddish font for screen display and printer, and over the years developed the his song database.

There came a realization that the collection should be in an institution where it could be properly housed and preserved, available for wider use. In 1996 the collection was moved to the University of Pennsylvania.

Bob and Molly collected recordings, publications and ephemera wherever they traveled – the United States, Canada, Argentina, the British Isles, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Spain, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, and Holland. The Archive is also the beneficiary of gifts of recordings, books, sheet music, and ephemera from myriad donors.

For decades, in addition to continuing to collect recordings and catalog the Archive holdings, the Freedmans provided a worldwide music reference service and gave classes upon request of various professors using material from the Archive. As a result, they are cited in countless scholarly books, articles, and papers. They gave presentations at academic institutions and community groups all over the United States and at the Jewish Music Institute at the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London.

The Yiddish language has a thousand-year history. However, the Yiddish song is relatively young, developing roughly from the 18th century through the first five decades of the 20th century. It encompasses lullabies and children's songs, love and marriage, humor and satire, dance songs and khasidic melodies, songs of migration, and songs of literary origin, from the concert and art song stage, as well as songs of World War II, written and sung in the camps and ghettos. As aptly put by Alan Lomax, the cultural anthropologist and folk song collector, "As a people live, so do they sing."

Joel Colman, in his master's thesis for a Sacred Music Degree from the Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, on characterizing the purposes of the language, wrote:

"The Yiddish language served many different purposes. On the simplest level, it was used by Jews as a means of communication, whether to speak to each other or for "just getting around" heavily Jewishly-populated areas. Yiddish also was a way for Jews to identify as Jews, both personally and intellectually - almost like a badge of honor. For new immigrants with few material possessions, but a strong sense of ethnicity, speaking Yiddish reinforced that identity and even, for some their self-esteem. Once established in America, continuing to speak Yiddish was a sign of taking pride in one's ancestry and in the Jewish community, both past and present. Additionally, the Yiddish language was a tool of unity for those American Jews who shared similar social problems."

Ruth Rubin, Yiddish folk songs collector and author of Voices of a People observed that the Yiddish folk song ". . .is the youngest offspring of Yiddish folk music and one of the richest stores of popular music in modern times. . . it reflects vividly the life of a community of many millions over a period of many generations... These are the songs which served the needs, moods, creative impulses and purposes of a particular environment at particular periods in the history of the largest Jewish community of modern times."

By the time Bob and Molly Freedman began to collect Yiddish music in the late 1950s, the violent destruction of vast numbers of carriers of Yiddish culture, coupled with the assimilatory process, weakened and sapped the vitality of Yiddish creative forces, and there were relatively few contemporary Yiddish recordings at that time. However, Yiddish, and particularly the music associated with it, experienced a resurgence in the late 20th century.