Voices that bring back the past
It is worthy of note that most of the Jewish artistes on the stage have been, at one time or another […] in the choir of the Reform Synagogue.” So claimed the Jewish Chronicle in 1890, referring to the West London Synagogue’s highquality choral ensemble. But who were these “artistes”, and how did they go from being synagogue choristers to stars of the stage?
Using archive copies of the Jewish Chronicle and the records of the West London Synagogue at Southampton University, music historian Dr Danielle Padley has unearthed a fascinating tale.
Padley discovered the stories of two of the Synagogue’s first female choristers, who gained renown as Gilbert and Sullivan’s leading ladies. While their operatic careers are well-documented, their earliest roles within the Jewish world are only now being brought to light.
Padley’s ongoing work at the University of Cambridge explores Jewish music-making in Victorian Britain, and the network of musicians whose careers crossed between the synagogue and the concert hall.
And Hidden Treasures, the Board of Deputies’ online project celebrating Jewish archives in Britain, came across another fascinating story, involving a unique recording of a Yiddish song from London’s East End sung by an amateur singer.
Peter Freedman, who now lives in Israel, had made a recording in the 1950s of his grandmother Sarah, who had immigrated from Posnan, Poland to London in 1903 and later went to live in Manchester. She was singing a Yiddish song, accompanied by her children and grandchildren who sang the chorus.
But he had been unable to identify the song until Peter’s great nephew Joel Salmon sent in the recording. Yiddishist Dr Vivi Lachs, whose book Whitechapel Noise examines Jewish immigrant life in Yiddish song and verse in London between 1884 and 1914, immediately identified the song as Hashiveynu Nazad.
She explained that it was a parody of a song by Avrom Goldfaden from his opera The Jewish Faust, and that it had been sung by Yiddish speaking Jews in London at the beginning of the 20th century. The original song has a Zionist theme suggesting that life for Eastern European Jews would be better in Palestine. The parody suggests that life in London, where they were poverty-stricken and subject to violent attack, was even worse than Eastern Europe and that they should return there.
Lachs’ own recording of Hashiveynu Nazad can be heard on Klezmer Klub’s CD Whitechapel mayn Vaytshepl.
Of course, voices are not always raised in song. There is something very special about hearing a person talk about their own life, whether it’s in person or — as now — on a screen. A number of archive projects have taken it on themselves to record the voices of members of the Jewish community.
Sephardi Voices UK is an oral history archive that gathers audio visual histories of Jews from North Africa, the Middle East and Iran who settled in the UK to keep the memories of these vanished communities alive and to document the journeys of migration, exile and resettlement. Interviewees are recorded with their family photos and other personal objects, such as an Iraqi passport shared by Niran Bassoon-Timan. The daughter of an eminent journalist, Niran was born in Baghdad in 1957. She was not allowed a passport until 1973 because Jews in Iraq were not permitted to have passports. Niran got one in 1973 to allow her to leave the country. She settled in Britain and became an activist, working with Arabicspeaking educators to tell the story of the Jews of Iraq.
North of the border, Gathering the Voices (gatheringthevoices.com) collects audio and video testimonies from refugees from Nazism who have connections with Scotland. Much larger, AJR Refugee Voices is the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR)’s ground-breaking Holocaust testimony collection — led by Dr Bea Lewkowicz — of more than 250 extensive video interviews with Jewish survivors and refugees from Nazi Europe who rebuilt their lives in Britain. It’s also an image archive, with nearly 4000 photos and documents. There are many other collections, including at the British Library and the Imperial War Museum.
In Wales, there are collections in the Sound Archives at St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff and a collection in the Screen and Sound Archives at the National Library of Wales. At the Bishopsgate Institute in London there are voices from the East End and St Albans Masorti Synagogue has an oral history project collecting the stories of some of those who made their home Hertfordshire.
Whatever your background, do interview your own family members to ensure that their voices are not lost. You can find advice on how to do so on the Hidden Treasures website at https:// celebratingjewisharchives.org.
Join the Hidden Treasures online event Voices from the Archives which will be livestreamed @seethetreasures and at https:// celebratingjewisharchives.org at 6pm on Sunday March 14. Dawn Waterman is the archives and heritage manager of the Board of Deputies of British Jews