Uncategorized
How hundreds of forgotten klezmer tunes have been rescued from oblivion
More than one thousand klezmer tunes, some dating back to the late 19th Century, are being performed and recorded after sitting in a library in Kiev for years, thanks to the nonprofit Klezmer Institute.
“This increases European klezmer music by fourfold over what was accessible before,” Christina Crowder, the New Haven-based accordion player who heads the institute, told me, adding that the collection ranges from virtuosic solo pieces to “workaday, regular old tunes.”
Digital photos of hundreds of pages of sheet music arrived on a memory stick at the Yiddish New York gathering in 2017, but the crowd-sourced effort to turn them into PDF files and share them on the web didn’t get going in earnest until late 2020. In the last couple of years, several albums featuring the resurrected klezmer tunes have been recorded. Crowder estimates that at least 72 musicians have digitized at least one tune for what has been dubbed the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP).
The project is working with a total of close to 1,400 tunes from two different sources: 26 notebooks of melodies collected by Zusman Kiselgof, a Russian folklorist who participated in the seminal An-ski ethnographic expeditions, and a 236-page manuscript by Avraham Yehoshua Makonovetsky, a Russian klezmer violinist who played at Jewish weddings. Both Kiselgof and Makonovetsky were Jews. The notebooks and the manuscript had been sitting in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.
“This is of incredible value,” Lyudmila Sholokhova, curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection at the New York Public Library, told me. She inventoried the Edison wax cylinder recordings of the Kiselgof collection when she worked at the Vernadsky and wrote her doctoral dissertation on early efforts to collect Jewish music in the Russian Pale of Settlement.
“This is a lot of unknown music and it also gives you a good idea how this music was actually played,” she said of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky collection. A small number of the tunes has been circulating in recent years before the KMDMP began.
The mixed blessing of COVID
The COVID lockdown turned out to be a blessing for the KMDMP because klezmer musicians were unable to play gigs or rehearse with their bandmates. So, they went to work digitizing the klezmer treasure trove.
“In the beginning during lockdown, you couldn’t go out to a gym, you couldn’t go play music with people. In the evening you can’t practice at home because there are neighbors. So, you digitize tunes,” Hannah Ochner told me.
The German klezmer clarinetist now lives in England and fronts a klezmer ensemble called Hop Skotshne. Ochner, 33, has a PhD. in physics and her main gig is researching electron microscopy in Cambridge. But she still found time to digitize an estimated 600 tunes over the course of a year and a half.
“It became addictive,” she said.
One of the untitled tunes Ochner worked on was a skotshne, a lively klezmer dance melody. The digital photo she worked from depicted a crumpled page, necessitating quite a bit of reconstruction.
“The length of the notes I left was longer than the music score,” she said.
The tune, Hannah’s Skotshne, was named in her honor.
Crowder said some of the hand-written scores were “a real mess.”
“You have to be a special kind of nerd to want to dive into this stuff,” she told me. “You’ve got four tunes crammed on the page and there’s mistakes and there’s all kinds of random old school notation.”
Crowder estimates that in addition to klezmer nerds like Ochner, a pool of more than 200 volunteers has helped by translating Russian or Yiddish text on sheet music or joined bi-weekly Zoom sessions where musicians play along with Crowder as she goes through tunes on her accordion.
The KMDMP now has at least a thousand klezmer melodies available for download as PDF’s, and Crowder said there are plans to publish a scholarly edition of some Kiselgof-Makonovetsky tunes as bound volumes. The Klezmer Institute is also planning to commission piano accompaniments for the many virtuosic solo violin pieces in the collection.
“They would be a lot of fun for a classically trained violinist to approach and to put into their own repertoire,” said Crowder. “Violin players don’t want to play clarinet pieces because they’re clarinet pieces.”
Music with global appeal
The KMDMP repertoire has been spreading at klezmer festivals in Europe and North America. The New York-based trumpeter Jordan Hirsch has passed them on to students at KlezKanada and Yiddish New York. Susi Evans and Szilvia Csaranko, a klezmer duo based in the UK and Germany, have taught the tunes at Shtetl Berlin jam sessions and Yiddish Summer Weimar, Europe’s major klezmer and Yiddish culture gathering.
Csaranko, an accordion player, is the musical director of Klezmerorchester Erfurt, an 80-piece amateur ensemble in Germany that performed a concert of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky repertoire in 2022 before an outdoor audience of 3,000.
Evans, a clarinetist who has performed as a soloist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, told me: “If you’re teaching klezmer music regularly, you’re always looking for tunes that someone who’s come into the workshop and knows a lot of tunes, won’t know.”
Their double CD, Fun an Altn Klezmer Heft, features 44 Kiselgof-Makonovetsky tunes, including “Hannah’s Skotshne.”
“Wherever we go, we like to spread these melodies,” Csaranko told me. “People do play these melodies they heard from us in jam sessions, in different countries. People in Australia are playing them now because they were in our workshop.”
The classically-trained clarinetist Angelo Baselli in Bologna, Italy teamed up with the accordionist Gianluca Casadei to record Fun a Velt Vos iz Nishto Mer, Of a World That Is No More. The album features Kiselgof-Makonovetsky tunes.
In a telephone interview Baselli, 47, said he caught the klezmer bug nearly 30 years ago after listening to Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz.
“I don’t have a Jewish family but instantly I fall in love with that music,” Baselli told me. “I started to search for recordings but at that time it was a little bit hard because there wasn’t a klezmer movement in Italy.”
A musical heirloom
Two klezmer trios in the Bay Area of Northern California have Kiselgof-Makonovetsky tracks on their most recent albums, both on the Borscht Beat label. Baymele’s album is Sapling. The new Veretski Pass album, The Peacock and the Sunflower, has eight Kiselgof-Makonovetsky numbers.
The Veretski Pass accordion player, Josh Horowitz, actually went to Ukraine before the KMDMP began and brought back some of the klezmer tunes from the collection.
“They were passed around like contraband at festivals,” the band’s violinist, Cookie Segelstein, said.
Their trio is named for a mountain pass in Ukraine where Segelstein’s father was born. Her mother grew up 45 miles away in the town Munkacs, where the Munkacher Hasidic sect began. So, for Segelstein, the archive of Kiselgof-Makonovetsky tunes is like a family heirloom.
“I have no way of going back to Veretski or where my mom is from and seeing her home because it was either destroyed or other people lived there,” she told me.
Describing the process of going through the unearthed klezmer tunes, Segelstein said: “We were digging through ashes. We would never have had this kind of access to this many historical tunes. To have this trove in one place has been like winning the lottery.”
The post How hundreds of forgotten klezmer tunes have been rescued from oblivion appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Downed Planes Raise New Perils for Trump as Tehran Hunts for Missing US Pilot
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Two US warplanes were downed over Iran and the Gulf, Iranian and US officials said on Friday, with two pilots rescued and a third still missing and being hunted by Tehran’s forces.
The incidents show the risks still faced by US and Israeli aircraft over Iran despite assertions from US President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that their forces had total control of the skies.
The first plane, a two-seat US F-15E jet, was shot down by Iranian fire, officials in both countries said.
The second plane, an A-10 Warthog fighter aircraft, was hit by Iranian fire and crashed over Kuwait, with the pilot ejecting, two US officials said.
Two Blackhawk helicopters involved in the search effort for the missing pilot were hit by Iranian fire but made it out of Iranian airspace, the two US officials told Reuters.
The degree of injuries among the crew of the aircraft remained unclear. The status and whereabouts of the missing F-15E crew member was not publicly known.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was combing an area near where the pilot’s plane came down in southwestern Iran and the regional governor promised a commendation for anyone who captured or killed “forces of the hostile enemy.”
Iranians, who have been pummeled by American air power for weeks, posted gleeful messages celebrating the plane downings. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the U.S. and Israel’s war had been “downgraded from regime change” to a hunt for their pilots.
Trump has been in the White House receiving updates on the search-and-rescue operation, a senior administration official told Reuters. The Pentagon and US Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
NO SIGN OF END TO WAR
The prospect of a US service person being alive and on the run inside Iran raises the stakes for Washington in a conflict with low public support and no sign of an imminent end.
Iran has officially told mediators it is not prepared to meet with US officials in Islamabad in coming days and that efforts to produce a ceasefire, led by Pakistan, have reached a dead end, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The US and Israel opened the campaign with a wave of strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. The war has killed thousands and threatened lasting damage to the global economy.
So far, 13 US military service members have been killed in the conflict and more than 300 have been wounded, according to the US Central Command.
Iran has rained down drones and missiles on Israel. It has also taken aim at Gulf countries allied to the US, which have so far held back from joining the war directly for fear of further escalation.
In a security alert on Friday, the US embassy in Beirut said Iran and its aligned armed groups may target universities in Lebanon and urged US citizens in the country to leave while commercial flights are still available.
Israel has been waging a parallel campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon after the militant group fired at Israel in support of Iran.
TRUMP THREAT TO STRIKE BRIDGES, POWER PLANTS
On Friday, as Trump threatened to hit its bridges and power plants, Iran struck a power and water plant in Kuwait, underlining the vulnerability of Gulf states that rely heavily on desalination plants for drinking water.
On Thursday, Trump posted footage on social media showing dust and smoke billowing up as US strikes hit the newly constructed B1 bridge between Tehran and nearby Karaj, which was due to open this year, and said more attacks would follow.
“Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” he wrote in a subsequent post.
On Friday, a drone hit a Red Crescent relief warehouse in the Choghadak area of Iran’s southern Bushehr province.
Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery had been hit by drones. Other attacks were also reported to have been intercepted in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Missile debris landed near the Israeli port of Haifa, site of a major oil refinery.
Oil markets were closed after benchmark U.S. crude prices gained 11% on Thursday following a speech by Trump that offered no clear sign of an imminent end to the war.
Uncategorized
US-Iran: Diplomatic Push Falters as Qatar Steps Back and Pakistan Talks Stall
Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani speaks after a meeting with the Lebanese president at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, Feb. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Emilie Madi
i24 News – Diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran appear to have reached an impasse, as key regional mediators pull back and broader talks stall.
According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Qatar has informed US officials that it does not wish to take a central role in mediating between the two sides. Officials familiar with the matter said Doha has made clear it is “not willing” to lead negotiations or act as the primary broker.
At the same time, Pakistan-led efforts to bring Iranian and American officials together have also stalled. Mediators say Tehran has refused to attend proposed meetings in Islamabad, calling Washington’s conditions “unacceptable,” further underscoring the widening gap between the two sides and the growing difficulty of restarting dialogue.
Despite the deadlock, diplomatic channels have not fully closed. Turkey and Egypt are continuing parallel efforts to revive talks, with discussions underway about potential alternative venues, including Doha and Istanbul.
US President Donald Trump downplayed the impact of recent military developments on diplomacy, including the destruction of a US fighter jet during operations in Iran. Speaking in a brief exchange with an NBC News journalist, he said: “No, not at all. It’s war. We are at war.”
He further fueled speculation with a cryptic social media post on Truth Social, writing: “Keep the oil, anyone?” criticising international allies on Friday over rising fuel prices. Trump appeared to mock allies such as the United Kingdom, writing that they should “keep the oil.”
Uncategorized
Report: Iran Retains Significant Missile Capability Despite Weeks of US-Led Strikes
Iranian missiles are displayed in a park in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 31, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – Despite weeks of sustained airstrikes by the United States and its allies, Iran has reportedly managed to retain a substantial portion of its military capabilities, particularly its ballistic missile arsenal.
According to a report by The New York Times citing US intelligence assessments, Tehran has developed methods to mitigate the impact of the strikes, allowing it to preserve and restore key parts of its missile infrastructure.
While the Pentagon has claimed responsibility for striking more than 11,000 targets over five weeks and reducing the rate of Iranian missile fire, intelligence officials now caution that the actual damage may be more limited than initially assessed. Iranian forces are reportedly able to rapidly repair or reactivate missile launchers stored in heavily fortified or underground facilities, sometimes within hours of being hit.
Analysts also point to the widespread use of decoy sites, which may have drawn strikes away from operational assets. Many of the targeted locations are believed to have contained dummy installations, complicating efforts to accurately gauge the degradation of Iran’s ballistic capabilities. Combined with deep underground bunkers and dispersed storage networks, this approach is seen as enabling Tehran to maintain a higher level of readiness than publicly estimated.
US intelligence officials assess that this resilience reflects a deliberate strategy: preserving a credible long-range strike capability as both a deterrent and a bargaining tool in any future negotiations, while ensuring regime survival and continued regional influence.
Despite sustained air dominance claimed by Washington and its allies, Iran’s adaptive tactics continue to complicate battlefield assessments, leaving the true balance of power in the conflict uncertain.