Biography

Yiddish Glory is a Toronto-based, Grammy-nominated ensemble led by Univ of Toronto Professor Anna Shternshis. Their first project, which was nominated for a Grammy award in 2019, "The Lost Songs of World War II" resurrected stories of Holocaust victims and survivors. As World War II raged through Europe, a group of Soviet Yiddish scholars led by ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky embarked on an ambitious goal to preserve Jewish culture of the 1940s. Shortly after the war, the researchers were arrested, their documents confiscated and thought lost to history - only to be discovered decades later by librarians at Ukraine’s Vernadsky National Library. Prof. Shternshis and Psoy Korolenko embarked on a project to resurrect these long lost songs that turned out to be the first grassroots testimonies of German atrocities. Their authors used music and poetry to describe violence and destruction that could not be easily comprehended in prose. Some were written by Red Army soldiers fighting in the trenches, others by women and men who anxiously waited for these soldiers to return (about 1.4 million Soviet Jews survived the war in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia), yet others by Jews in occupied Ukraine and other parts of the USSR (over 2.5 million Jews were killed in the European part of the Soviet Union). “Yiddish Glory” is the fruit of this 5 year project. For the first time, the public will hear the voices of Soviet Jews who were thought to be silenced by Hitler and Stalin.