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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.
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Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes’ overtime goal propels US to historic gold medal in Olympic hockey
(JTA) — Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes scored the game-winning goal Sunday to clinch a gold medal for the U.S. men’s hockey team, its first since 1980.
The New Jersey Devils star center, who had scored twice in Team USA’s semifinal win, sent the puck between the legs of Canadian goaltender Jordan Binnington 1:41 into overtime to give the American team a 2-1 win.
“This is all about our country right now. I love the USA,” Hughes told NBC. “I love my teammates.”
The win broke a 46-year Olympic drought for Team USA, which had not taken gold since the famous “Miracle on Ice” team that upset the Soviet Union on its way to gold in 1980. The United States also won in 1960.
“He’s a freaking gamer,” Quinn Hughes, Jack’s older brother and U.S. teammate said, according to The Athletic. “He’s always been a gamer. Just mentally tough, been through a lot, loves the game. American hero.”
Quinn Hughes is a defender for the Minnesota Wild and a former captain of the Vancouver Canucks who won the NHL’s top defenseman award in 2024. He was also named the best defender in the Olympic tournament by the International Ice Hockey Federation after scoring an overtime goal to send the U.S. team to the semifinals.
The third Jewish member of the U.S. team, Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman, won the one game he played, a Feb. 14 preliminary-round victory over Denmark.
The Hughes family — rounded out by youngest brother Luke, who also plays for the Devils — has long been lauded as a Jewish hockey dynasty. They are the first American family to have three siblings picked in the first round of the NHL draft, and Jack was the first Jewish player to go No. 1 overall. They are also the first trio of Jewish brothers to play in the same NHL game and the first brothers to earn cover honors for EA Sports’ popular hockey video game.
Jack, who had a bar mitzvah, has said his family celebrated Passover when he was growing up. Their mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who is Jewish, represented the U.S. women’s hockey team at the 1992 Women’s World Championships and was on the coaching staff of the gold-medal-winning women’s team in Milan. Weinberg-Hughes is also a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
Hughes’ golden goal ushered in a burst of Jewish pride on social media, with one user calling it “the greatest Jewish sports moment of all time.” The Hockey News tweeted that Hughes was “the first player in hockey history to have a Bar Mitzvah and a Golden Goal! Pretty cool!”
Jewish groups and leaders also jumped on the praise train. “Special shout out to @jhugh86 on scoring the game-winning goal!” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “Beyond his incredible skill on the ice, Jack makes history as a proud representative of the American Jewish community, reminding us that the Jewish people are interwoven into America in her 250th year! Mazel Tov, Jack!”
The post Jewish hockey star Jack Hughes’ overtime goal propels US to historic gold medal in Olympic hockey appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran and US Views on Sanctions Relief Differ, Iranian Official Tells Reuters
Iranian women walk past an anti-US billboard in Tehran, Iran, February 19, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran and the United States have differing views over sanctions relief in talks to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Sunday, adding that new talks were planned in early March as fears of a military confrontation grow.
Iran and the US renewed negotiations earlier this month to tackle their decades-long dispute over Tehran’s nuclear program as the US builds up its military capability in the Middle East, fueling fears of a wider war.
Iran has threatened to strike US bases in the Middle East if it is attacked by US forces.
“The last round of talks showed that US ideas regarding the scope and mechanism of sanctions relief differ from Iran’s demands. Both sides need to reach a logical timetable for lifting sanctions,” the official said.
“This roadmap must be reasonable and based on mutual interests.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Friday that he expected to have a draft counterproposal ready within days, while US President Donald Trump said he was considering limited military strikes.
READINESS TO COMPROMISE
While rejecting a US demand for “zero enrichment” – a major sticking point in past negotiations – Tehran has signaled its readiness to compromise on its nuclear work.
Washington views enrichment inside Iran as a potential pathway to nuclear weapons. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons and wants its right to enrich uranium to be recognized.
Washington has also demanded that Iran relinquish its stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU). The UN nuclear agency last year estimated that stockpile at more than 440 kg of uranium enriched to up to 60% fissile purity, a small step away from the 90% that is considered weapons grade.
The Iranian official said Tehran could seriously consider a combination of exporting part of its HEU stockpile, diluting the purity of its most highly enriched uranium and the establishment of a regional enrichment consortium in exchange for the recognition of Iran’s right to “peaceful nuclear enrichment.”
“The negotiations continue and the possibility of reaching an interim agreement exists,” he said.
BENEFITS FOR BOTH SIDES
Iranian authorities have said that a diplomatic solution delivers economic benefits for both Tehran and Washington.
“Within the economic package under negotiation, the United States has also been offered opportunities for serious investment and tangible economic interests in Iran’s oil industry,” the official said.
However, he said Tehran will not hand over control of its oil and mineral resources.
“Ultimately, the US can be an economic partner for Iran, nothing more. American companies can always participate as contractors in Iran’s oil and gas fields.”
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Mike Huckabee’s Comments to Tucker Carlson on Israel and Middle East Land Draw Condemnation in Region
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Comments by US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee suggesting that Israel had a biblical right to much of the Middle East drew condemnation over the weekend from countries across the region, who called his remarks “dangerous and inflammatory.”
Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, has been a staunch supporter of Israel throughout his political career and a longtime defender of Jewish settlements in the West Bank – land which the Palestinians seek for a state.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson that was conducted on Wednesday in Israel and aired on Friday, the populist US talk show host asked Huckabee about Israel’s right to exist and about Jewish roots in the ancient land.
Citing the book of Genesis, Carlson asked whether the modern state of Israel had a right to the lands promised in the Bible by God to Abraham, stretching from the Euphrates River to the Nile, covering much of the Middle East. In response, Huckabee said:
“It would be fine if they took it all. But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”
Huckabee added: “We’re talking about this land that the state of Israel now lives in and wants to have peace in, they’re not trying to take over Jordan, they’re not trying to take over Syria, they’re not trying to take over Iraq or anywhere else. They want to protect their people.”
In response, a joint statement condemning Huckabee’s comments was issued by the Palestinians and countries in the Middle East and beyond, including Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan.
They said his comments were: “Dangerous and inflammatory remarks, which constitute a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, and pose a grave threat to the security and stability of the region.”
A US Embassy spokesperson said Huckabee’s comments did not reflect any change in US policy and that his full remarks made clear that Israel has no desire to change its current boundaries.
Israeli officials did not immediately comment on the interview or the reaction from countries that signed the joint statement.