• Track Listing

The German label Bear Family once again boldly goes where no label has ever gone before, offering an 11-CD-plus-DVD record of the recordings made in Berlin by the Judischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural League) during the ’30s under the constant surveillance of the Gestapo. Many of these records saw their only release in Palestine from 1934 to 1936 and are incredibly rare, existing in many cases as only single pressings. Yet they are preserved here, over 14 hours of music ranging from classical music to Yiddish comedians, and, above all, extraordinary cantorial singing. A DVD with a reconstructed version of the sound film Hebraische Melodie (Hebrew Melody) is also presented here for the first time. A 516-page hardback book in both German and English puts these recordings in historical context.