David and Ina Shiff WEVD music collection

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id: 11881
origination: WEVD (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
date statement: 1889-1995 [bulk 1900s-1960s]
key date: 1889
identifier (local_mss): 188091
org unit: Music Division
call number: JPB 25-10
b-number: b23669790
total components: 2653
total series: 0
max depth: 2
boost queries: (none)
component layout: Default Layout
Extended MARC Fields: false
Extended Navigation: false
created: 2025-07-22 21:52:10 UTC
updated: 2026-01-20 21:07:32 UTC
status note: (missing)
Display Aeon link: true

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unitid: {"value"=>"188091", "type"=>"local_mss"}

{"value"=>"JPB 25-10", "type"=>"local_call"}

{"value"=>"b23669790", "type"=>"local_b"}
unitdate: {"value"=>"1889-1995", "type"=>"inclusive", "normal"=>"1889/1995"}

{"value"=>"1900s-1960s", "type"=>"bulk", "normal"=>"1900/1969"}
unittitle: {"value"=>"David and Ina Shiff WEVD music collection"}
physdesc: {"format"=>"structured", "physdesc_components"=>[{"name"=>"extent", "value"=>"164 boxes", "unit"=>"containers"}, {"name"=>"extent", "value"=>"45 linear feet", "unit"=>"linear_feet"}]}
repository: {"value"=>"<span class=\"corpname\">Music Division</span>"}
abstract: {"value"=>"WEVD was a New York City radio station best-known for its Yiddish language programming geared towards Jewish immigrant audiences. The station, whose popularity peaked from the 1930s to the 1950s, regularly featured live music performances with a house orchestra. The David and Ina Shiff WEVD music collection, dating from 1889 to 1995 (bulk dates 1900s-1960s), contains thousands of scores, parts, arrangements, and sheet music for songs and compositions that were performed on WEVD. The collection highlights the work of Jewish composers in the United States and Europe, as well as classical and popular music by non-Jewish composers whose vocal works were often translated into Yiddish. It also includes musical manuscripts of compositions written specifically for WEVD, many of which have never been published."}
langmaterial: {"value"=>"Multiple languages"}

{"value"=>"The collection is predominantly in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, French, German, Russian, and Italian."}
origination: {"value"=>"WEVD (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)", "type"=>"corpname"}
bioghist: {"value"=>"<p>WEVD was a New York City brokered radio station founded in 1927 by the Socialist Party of America. The station's initials were named after the party's recently deceased leader, Eugene V. Debs. Its initial programming maintained a heavy socialist bent, with talks by leading left-wing figures, economic courses, and news segments. The station also featured music programs, including <span class=\"title\">The Forward Hour</span>, a variety show aimed at New York's Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. <span class=\"title\">The Forward Hour</span> was launched by <span class=\"title\">The Jewish Daily Forward</span> (now <span class=\"title\">The Forward</span>), the world's largest Yiddish newspaper at the time, and a supporter of WEVD.</p> <p>After being moved to a new frequency by the Federal Radio Commission, WEVD experienced financial and operational difficulties. The Forward Association, owner of <span class=\"title\">The Jewish Daily Forward</span>, invested thousands of dollars into the station, saving it from cancellation and officially taking it over in 1932. Around this time, WEVD began billing itself as \"the station that speaks your language,\" a tagline that remained for decades.</p> <p>By the mid-1940s, the majority of WEVD broadcasts were in Yiddish, and its socialist politics had shifted to a more moderate perspective. WEVD was the most listened to Yiddish radio station in New York City, with a wide variety of programming. Along with <span class=\"title\">The Forward Hour</span>, the station featured lectures by rabbis; philosophical discussions, promotions by local schools and yeshivas, radio dramas, Shabbat announcements, and news broadcasts. Musical segments, under the direction of Nicholas Saslavsky from the 1930s to the 1960s, included cantorial and choral singing, as well as performances of Yiddish popular and folk songs with the station's house orchestra. At the height of WEVD's popularity, the orchestra consisted of as many as sixteen instruments, including piano, organ, harmonium, violins, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, and percussion (usually timpani). One program featured singers Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn performing Yiddish and Polish versions of American theater songs. Other singers who performed on WEVD included Moshe Ganchoff, Isa Kremer, Noah Nachbush, Mark Olf, Moyshe and Freydele Oysher, and Herman Yablokoff. In addition to live broadcasts, WEVD incorporated recorded music into its programming, mostly Jewish folk songs and orchestral pieces.</p> <p><span class=\"title\">The Forward Hour</span> and other shows regularly presented the music of Jewish composers and arrangers living in New York City, many of whom were involved in the city's Yiddish theater scene. New York-based composers and arrangers whose work was performed on WEVD included Joseph Cherniavsky, Abraham Ellstein, Mikhl Gelbart, Samuel Medoff (also known as Dick Manning), Alexander Olshanetsky, Joseph Rumshinsky, Sholom Secunda, and Zavel Zilberts. Some composers, such as Ellstein and Secunda, were on WEVD's staff.</p> <p>WEVD's popularity declined in the 1950s with the rise of television and decreasing numbers of Yiddish speakers. The house orchestra, in turn, shrunk to a quartet and, later, only a piano. However, <span class=\"title\">The Forward Hour</span> remained a fixture for decades, while other shows, such as Friday afternoon Shabbat announcements, continued through the 1980s. By the 1990s, WEVD had replaced most of its Jewish programming with talk shows. In 2003, the Forward Association sold the station to ESPN, which changed the call letters to WEPN.</p> <p>--</p> <p>David Shiff was born in 1935 in the Bronx, New York. He served as a cantor at the Midchester Jewish Center in Yonkers, New York from 1956 to 2005. Around 1953, Shiff began singing for WEVD. He appeared on several regular shows, including his own Friday afternoon Shabbat program when he announced candle-lighting times. Shiff also appeared on <span class=\"title\">The Forward Hour</span> for several years, during which he sang Yiddish songs by Alexander Olshanetsky, Joseph Rumshinsky, Sholom Secunda, and others.</p> <p>In the early 1980s, when WEVD was preparing to move offices, the station planned to discard its collection of scores that were used for past broadcasts. Learning of this, Shiff decided to save the scores in his home, where they remained for forty years before he donated them to The New York Public Library.</p> <p>Shiff lived with his wife, Ina, in Yonkers. He died in February 2025.</p>"}
scopecontent: {"value"=>"<p>The David and Ina Shiff WEVD music collection, dating from 1889 to 1995 (bulk dates 1900s-1960s), contains scores, parts, arrangements, and sheet music for nearly 2,000 songs and compositions that were performed for live broadcasts on WEVD. The collection emphasizes the work of 20th century Jewish composers and arrangers in New York City, while providing insight into a major radio station's music programming practices. It contains no audio recordings of WEVD broadcasts.</p> <p>The majority of music in the collection was assembled or arranged by WEVD in the 1930s and 1940s. Broadcast dates are listed for hundreds of songs in the collection; all of these broadcast dates range from 1959 to 1969. It is likely the songs were performed in earlier (and possibly later) years, but only broadcast dates from this range are provided.</p> <p>The collection encompasses Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs; Yiddish popular music, including theater songs; Jewish liturgical music; chamber music; orchestral music; opera arias; klezmer; piano music; and American popular music. There are also songs about the establishment of the state of Israel, and musical arrangements of Yiddish poetry.</p> <p>The following information is recorded in the container list for every song or composition:</p> <p> - Title</p> <p> - Opus number (when applicable)</p> <p> - Date(s) of publication or creation</p> <p> - Language(s) (when there are no lyrics, usually the language of the title is recorded)</p> <p> - Instrumentation</p> <p> - Type(s) of notated music</p> <p> - Lyricists or other creators (when present)</p> <p> - WEVD broadcast dates (when provided)</p> <p>Many scores were originally housed in folders with handwritten information on them, including song titles, composer names, estimated running times, and broadcast dates. These folders are retained in the collection. Occasionally, performer last names are listed alongside broadcast dates on the folders.</p> <p>Songs and compositions are represented by some combination of sheet music, full scores, parts, arrangements, vocal scores, and lyric sheets. Much of the notation in the collection is handwritten, including instrumental parts and Yiddish vocal parts arranged specifically for WEVD performances. The vast majority of these handwritten instrumental and vocal parts date from the late 1930s and 1940s (years are indicated by American Federation of Musicians stamps). A significant portion of these arrangements have never been published.</p> <p>The collection also holds a large amount of published music in the form of piano/vocal scores, scores for mixed voices, orchestral parts and full scores, and song collections. Published music often features annotations, such as additional music direction and Yiddish translations written above the original text. Published music dates chiefly from the 1900s to the 1940s.</p> <p>A common set for a song will include a published piano/vocal score, and later handwritten parts arranged for WEVD's house orchestra. If the published score is in a language other than Yiddish, a handwritten or typed Yiddish translation is often provided. The published vocal parts frequently include handwritten transliterated Yiddish text inscribed beneath the musical lines.</p> <p>Another scenario is to have manuscript scores and parts with no additional published version. There are also songs with published sheet music or scores and no separate handwritten notation. Often, when a song is arranged for mixed voices, several versions of the same published score are included and used as parts for the different singers.</p> <p>Generally, song and composition titles are recorded in the container list in the language in which they appear on the scores. Song titles, creator names, and lyrics in Yiddish, Hebrew, or other languages in non-Latin scripts are almost always transliterated to Latin script on the scores. Transliterated titles are typically recorded in the container list as they appear on the scores. Because titles are transliterated by different people over decades - for both published works and WEVD's own arrangements - the spelling of certain Yiddish and Hebrew words may be inconsistent throughout the collection.</p> <p>After Yiddish and Hebrew, the most common languages in the collection are English, French, German, Russian, and Italian.</p> <p>Hundreds of composers and arrangers are represented in the collection. The vast majority are Jewish, many of whom immigrated to the United States from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sholom Secunda and Zavel Zilberts are the two most represented composers in the entire collection, with more than seventy songs each, including handwritten arrangements. Other composers and arrangers with substantial content include Abraham Wolf Binder, Samuel Bugatch, Julius Chajes, Joseph Cherniavsky, Abraham Ellstein, Joel Engel, Mikhl Gelbart, Vladimir Heifetz, Pinchas Jassinowsky, Henry Lefkowitch, Boris Levenson, Leo Low, Alexander Olshanetsky, Meyer Posner, Herc Rubin, Nicholas Saslavsky, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Mark Silver.</p> <p>Highlights of the collection include handwritten and published scores for dozens of Yiddish theater songs by Abraham Ellstein, Abraham Goldfaden, Alexander Olshanetsky, Joseph Rumshinsky, and Sholom Secunda; Yiddish translations of works by Georges Bizet, Johann Brahms, Antonin Dvořák, Jules Massenet, and Sergei Rachmaninoff; three arrangements of the Holocaust survivor anthem \"Song of the Jewish Partisans\" (by Julius Chajes, Lazar Weiner, and O.J. Zinatow); works in less common languages, such as Romanian (\"Doina Haiducului\"), Greek (\"Dio glinka matakia, matia zafirenia\"), Croatian (\"Jad Anuga\" and <span class=\"title\">Džunaj</span>), Polish (<span class=\"title\">Repertoire of J. Gerstein's Chorus in Wilno</span>), and Ukrainian (Evgen Turula's <span class=\"title\">Ukrainian Carols</span>); vocal works set to music by Jewish poets Hayim Nahman Bialik, Rachel Korn, and Abraham Reisen; four versions of the popular Jewish folk song \"Hava Nagila;\" published collections of cantorial music (by Moshe Bick, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, A. Philip Waxman, and Zavel Zilberts); and different arrangements of Hebrew prayers, including \"Adon Olam\" and \"Mizmor l'David.\"</p> <p>There are numerous composers and arrangers who have only one song in the collection. Elsewhere, there are scores and sheet music for compositions by prominent 18th and 19th century non-Jewish composers, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Giuseppe Verdi.</p>"}
arrangement: {"value"=>"<p>The collection is arranged alphabetically by composer or arranger last name, with songs and compositions listed alphabetically under each name. Some composers and arrangers are identified by last name only, or by last name and first name initial. When a composer or arranger is not known, songs are grouped under a lyricist. There are four cases of songs having no known creators; these songs are listed alphabetically by title.</p>"}
acqinfo: {"value"=>"<p>Donated by David Shiff in 2023.</p>"}
processinfo: {"value"=>"<p>Processed by <span class=\"name\">Nathan Evans</span> in <span class=\"date\">2025</span>.</p>"}
date_start: 1889
keydate: 1889
date_end: 1995
date_inclusive_start: 1889
date_inclusive_end: 1995
date_bulk_start: 1900
date_bulk_end: 1969
extent_statement: 45 linear feet (164 boxes)
prefercite: {"value"=>"David and Ina Shiff WEVD music collection, JPB 25-10. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts"}

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