Song Searcher. The Times & Toils of Moyshe Beregovsky

This is the final event accompanying the RPS exhibition: Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors which ends on 27 March.

Song Searcher: The Times and Toils of Moyshe Beregovsky is a documentary film that tells the story of musician and scholar Moyshe Beregovsky (Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovskii) who 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 the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the Living Voice of his people from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life.

Filmed on location in Ukraine and in other countries, and with rare, video-footage and archival audio materials, this film is more than an account of Beregovsky’s life and work. Using haunting historical images, the heart-breaking testimony of surviving eyewitnesses and the commentary of renowned international scholars, it tells the awe-inspiring story of Beregovsky’s people, whose song could not be silenced even during the darkest hour in their history.

Runtime: 83 minutes
Director: Elena Yakovich | Executive Producer: Victorina Petrossiants