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The Yiddish Radio Project
How a Surprise Find of Audio Disks Led to This Series
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Yiddish Radio Project
May 21 feature: Holocaust survivor Siegbert Freiberg tells his story in Reunion.
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Max and Siegbert Freiberg
Photo © 2002 Sound Portraits Productions
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• View a photo gallery of the Freibergs and their on-air reunion.
• Listen to five more early radio broadcasts about the Holocaust.
The Yiddish Radio Project on All Things Considered
• Creating the Project
Henry Sapoznik and the genesis of the Yiddish Radio Project.
• Yiddish Words
Learn the pronunciation and definition of some common Yiddish terms.
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The Yiddish Radio Project stems from one fateful day 17 years ago when musician and historian Henry Sapoznik walked into an old New York City storeroom. There, among looming stacks of broken records and musty pamphlets, Sapoznik made the discovery of a lifetime: a handful of single-cut aluminum transcription disks of Yiddish radio shows from the 1930s and '40s.
In the years since then, Sapoznik has combed attics, flea markets and even dumpsters in an attempt to find and preserve all of the last surviving remnants of Yiddish radio.
The collection has grown to more than 500 hours of recordings on 1,000 fragile disks, with everything from man-on-the-street interviews and news programs to searing dramas and swinging music shows -- the last recorded vestiges of a people in the midst of a cultural Renaissance.
"You have to remember, these are one-of-a-kind recordings," explains Sapoznik. "So much was so close to being lost forever. What choice did I have?"
Award-winning radio documentary producer Dave Isay says listening to the rare cache of broadcast disks "was like opening up King Tut's Tomb."
"Taken together, the collection give us this incredibly intimate snapshot of American Jewish life in the 1930s and '40s. You see the collision of Yiddish and American cultures, the day-to-day lives of immigrants struggling to make it in a new land, and the dawning reality of the genocide occurring across the ocean."
 Browse more NPR stories on Yiddish.
Other Resources
• Visit the official Web site of the Yiddish Radio Project.
• Yiddish Radio Project producer Henry Sapoznik is also the executive director of LivingTraditions.org, supporting education in "community-based traditional folk culture."
• The Yiddish Voice, a radio show based in Boston, Mass., features live Web audio on Wednesdays.
• Learn more about the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.
• Read about the Spoken Yiddish Language Project at Columbia University.
• Make Yiddish online with the virtual Yiddish Typewriter.
• Web site for the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture.
• Hungry for klezmer music? Legacy Recordings has three CDs from classic klezmer artists.
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