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A moving tribute to Soviet Jewry, with uncomfortable contemporary echoes

JL;DR SUMMARY Yiddish Glory's new album, "The Silenced Songs of WWII," continues the project of preserving Soviet-Jewish cultural heritage through music, initiated by Moyshe Beregovsky and continued by Anna Shternshis and Psoy Korolenko. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HolocaustSoviet JewryWwiiYiddish MusicHistorical NarrativeCultural PreservationYiddish GloryMoyshe BeregovskyPsoy KorolenkoAnna Shternshis

Places mentioned

Kyiv, Ukraine
"263 original songs in all, constituting a record of a culture on the brink of oblivion languished in the basement of a Kyiv library until it was discovered by chance in 1990."
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"led by Anna Shternshis, professor of Yiddish studies at the University of Toronto took up Beregovskys task, and out of the jumbled archive they pieced together an album of Yiddish songs."
Kalisz, Greater Poland, Poland
"In A Priest Murdered in Kalisz, the singer, Leyb Diament, recounts the 1939 murder of a Catholic priest in a central square in the titular town in Poland."
Berlin, Germany
"who, after being liberated from the ghetto in late 1944, was drafted into the Red Army and ultimately ended up in Berlin."
Auschwitz, Lesser Poland, Poland
"though not before he helped liberate Auschwitz."
Moldova
"written by a teacher at an orphanage in the Mogilev-Podolsky ghetto, in the Transnistria region which today is Moldova imagines the war from the perspective of an anti-fascist louse."
Vinnychchyna, Ukraine
"the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine."

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Retrieved 2026-04-14 05:30:52 UTC
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