Published: 7 August 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
IN THE EARLY YEARS of the 20th century, The Hotel Marseilles at Broadway and 103rd Street was near the height of fashion, a place for bridge parties, “orchid teas” and even a few society scandals.
By the 1940s the neighbourhood had taken a turn, and with it the hotel: The United Service of New Americans, later folded into HIAS, used the hotel as an absorption centre for Jewish refugees from Europe, often the last survivors from their families.
Luckily, in the summer of 1948, an amateur folklorist showed up at the Marseilles to preserve some of that culture. Ben Stonehill carried a wire recording device and asked the Yiddish-speaking residents to share songs and memories.
Eventually he recorded more than 1,000 songs in Yiddish, Polish, Czech and Hebrew. Stonehill died in 1964, but the recordings made their way into the Library of Congress and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and onto the web through a partnership with the Centre for Traditional Music and Dance.
Last week the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust announced it will host an online multimedia program with Yiddish scholar Miriam Isaacs, who taught, studied and translated Yiddish at the University of Maryland College Park and led the effort to curate Stonehill’s archive on the web.
FULL STORY How an amateur folklorist saved the sounds of Yiddish culture (Times of Israel)
Photo: Photo: Ben Stonehill and his sons, 1948. At left is the Hotel Marseilles in Manhattan, which after World War II housed Jewish refugees from Europe. (Courtesy of Lenox Stonehill and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; Museum of Jewish Heritage)
