In April 2022, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (MAHJ) deposited with the Institut Européen des Musiques Juives (IEMJ) a collection of one hundred and twenty-three records, mainly 78s stored in the museum’s reserves.
On this occasion, a partnership was signed between the two institutions to set up joint initiatives to promote their music collections, and to organize concerts, symposia and other events at the MAHJ[1]Such as the Hebraic Melodies concert in 2022, the symposium on Ashkenazi music in France or the loan of documents for the exhibition on the Dibbouk (2024)..
Thanks to its equipment and the motivation of its team, the IEMJ was able to digitize these one hundred and twenty-three discs and make them available on the Rachel Catalog, which is also used by the MAHJ library. The discs were then packaged and stored in a room that met library conservation standards, in terms of both temperature and hygrometry.
Because of their rarity and fragility, 78 rpm records are highly coveted by collectors. What’s more, it’s not uncommon for certain tracks recorded on 78 rpm to have never been reissued on more up-to-date formats.
Among the records entrusted to us are prestigious artists such as Shoshana Damari, Aaron Lebedeff, Leo Fuld, Pesach Burstein, Sarah Gorby, Mickey Katz (real name Meyer Myron Katz), Jennie Goldstein and many others.
The MAHJ collection currently comprises 234 documents, mainly audio, which can be listened to in their entirety in the Rachel network libraries (Alliance israélite Universelle, Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, Maison de la Culture Yiddish, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Séminaire Israélite de France…) or in part by clicking on the following link.
Listen to 13 tracks from the MAHJ collection in the playlist below.
| 1 | Such as the Hebraic Melodies concert in 2022, the symposium on Ashkenazi music in France or the loan of documents for the exhibition on the Dibbouk (2024). |
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