Newly digitized recordings offer a glimpse of the Ukrainian-Jewish past | Hacker News Reader

Newly digitized recordings offer a glimpse of the Ukrainian-Jewish past

tabletmag.com

64 pointstintinnabula7 comments

My friend runs a great blog called Forgotten Galicia. Here’s a recent post including Jewish history in the region: https://forgottengalicia.com/vanished-world-galicias-jewish-...

My company outsources to Ukraine. Something that bothered me there was in the city of Lviv. Directly next to the demolished synagogue that is now a memorial, there is a restaurant named after that same demolished synagogue that parodizes Jews. The bill shows up and costs significantly more than it should. The waiters wear wigs to look like Hasidic Jews. On national TV, they make jokes out of exaggerating Jewish mannerisms. Without efforts like these to digitize the past, Ukraine will white wash their history and cover it up by scapegoating Jews.

the link to the audio CDs is dead, here is an archived version https://web.archive.org/web/20180221191627/http://audio.ipri...

Sadly nothing more than the titles and an email address on there

this recalls to my mind J.S. Foer's 'Everything is Illuminated,' which deals with Ukrainian-Jewish issues in general and identity in particular. Was also made into an outstanding and hilarious movie by L. Schrieber

Neat. It would be awesome if they would open source some of the files for download. I did not see a place in the article suggesting that.

in the old days, the libraries of the former Soviet states would only do trades for materials. I had a colleague who corresponded with a library in St. Petersburg and would trade microfilms (!) of Talmud manuscripts to get ones that hadn't ever been seen in the west before. This was roughly '92 through about '99. Then when it opened up more, selling microfilm or high-res scans of old texts and manuscripts was a big source of hard currency for the libraries' operating budgets.

I suspect the lack of open-sourcing is to preserve an important revenue stream for the archive which I suspect is, like all libraries everywhere, horribly underfunded.

I'd be thrilled if they had an English / Hebrew language site that took donations. Could probably get a decent return on that small investment.

Very well done, Jake.

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