Song Searcher - The Times and Toils of Moyshe Beregovsky

Moyshe Beregovsky, musician and scholar, crisscrossed Ukraine with a phonograph in hand during the most dramatic years of Soviet history to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jewry. His work began in the 1920s and led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of those he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were shot by the Nazis and tossed into countless mass graves. Ultimately, Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of a centuries-old Yiddish civilization.