Collections
Shira unites several of the Penn Libraries' Jewish music collections in one catalog. The collections complement one another in language, genre, and format — from 78 rpm discs and LPs to compositions and sheet music.
The cornerstone of Shira is the Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive, one of the foremost collections of recorded Jewish music. Assembled over [PLACEHOLDER: decades / dates] and given to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the archive documents Yiddish song, klezmer, cantorial and liturgical music, Yiddish theater, Sephardic and Ladino traditions, and Israeli and Hebrew popular music across thousands of commercial and field recordings.
[PLACEHOLDER: a sentence on Robert and Molly Freedman and the significance of the collection.] Records originating in the Freedman archive carry their Freedman catalog identifiers, linking Shira back to the archive's own finding aids.
Alongside the Freedman archive, Shira draws on additional Jewish music collections held at Penn. [PLACEHOLDER: brief framing sentence.]
[PLACEHOLDER: one–two sentence description of this Penn collection and what it adds.]
[PLACEHOLDER: one–two sentence description.]
Where a recording also lives in a partner archive, Shira links out so you can listen or read more.