Oy! Translate that tune

On the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library, Molly Freedman sits in a small room filled with stacks of CDs, Jewish-themed posters and antique music-playing equipment. Her late mother's soothing voice bursts forth from computer speakers, singing in a tongue a thousand years old. Molly cannot help but hum along to the words that used to sway her to sleep as a little girl.

Molly's husband of 47 years, Bob Freedman, quickly joins his wife in reciting the emotion-laden lines. With eyes shining, Bob - a 1954 Penn Law School graduate - translates the Yiddish lyrics into English.

"You can get anything for money," he paraphrases. "But a mother, there's just one in all the world."

The Yiddish lullaby, "Nor a Mame," is just one song in the Freedmans' vast and varied collection of Jewish music, widely considered the world's premier private collection of its type. Since 1997, the collection has been housed in the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Van Pelt.

From religious hymns to modern klezmer melodies, the Freedmans have amassed over 3,000 recordings holding some 21,000 unique tracks, preserved at a time when Yiddish as a language is in steep decline among the world's Jewish population.

For the Freedmans, Jewish songs serve as invaluable links to their parents, who were among the millions of predominantly Eastern European Jews who immigrated to America between 1881 and 1924 to escape poverty, political upheavals and religious persecution. Their parents - who were all from the Ukraine - shared a strong commitment to the Yiddish language and its concomitant culture, often referred to as Yiddishkeit.

"We both grew up in Yiddish-speaking homes," Molly said. "My mother remembered hundreds of songs, and Bob's father had a photographic memory for the words of poems and literature and music."

"As children in the '30s and '40s, I thought that the whole world came from Russia and that everybody was a Yiddish speaker," Bob added. "When friends and family would come together, they would sing all the time and talk politics. They were a very alive generation."

Most scholars believe that Yiddish, a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet, originated among Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe as early as the 10th century. As the language spread across Europe in later centuries, a rich and vibrant culture grew up along side it. When Yiddish-speaking European Jewish immigrants flocked to America, they brought their culture with them, establishing Yiddish newspapers, putting on Yiddish plays and composing Yiddish music. According to the National Yiddish Book Center, at the eve of World War II, there were about 11 million Yiddish speakers in the world.

Growing up in Philadelphia, Bob and Molly attended Yiddish secular schools and Yiddish summer camps. Their exposure to Yiddishkeit proved especially valuable in the dating world.

After graduating law school, Bob said he was a "fancy-free and footloose" young man, dating a number of "fancy ladies." But when he met Molly at a party, he felt a much deeper cultural connection.

When Molly and Bob would join their friends at the Jersey shore, they did not engage in the conventional courting rituals.

"We would walk down the boardwalk," Bob said, "And we would sit on a park bench and sing Yiddish songs."

Soon after Bob and Molly were married in 1959, the couple began their search for Jewish music. But it wasn't easy.

The Holocaust had wiped out nearly half of the world's Yiddish-speaking population, and oppression in the Soviet Union and the promotion of Hebrew in Israel caused a further decline in the number of Yiddish speakers. In America, the forces of assimilation caused many children and grandchildren of Yiddish speakers to be estranged from the language and culture of their ancestors.

At present, the survival of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture is particularly precarious, since many of the people intimately connected with the language and culture have already died or are growing old. Most Yiddish speakers today are concentrated in the United States and Israel, and numbers are dwindling.

According to Penn Yiddish professor Kathryn Hellerstein, Yiddish as a language and culture has experienced a resurgence in the past few decades by moving from the home to the academic world. Nearly the only communities in the United States that use Yiddish on a daily basis are ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic Jews.

Frequently consulted by Penn faculty and students interested in Jewish history and culture, the sound archive has increasingly garnered international esteem as well.

In the 1970s, '80s and '90s, Yiddish professors at Penn began taking their classes on field trips to the Freedmans' suburban home, where their collection was housed at the time. Scholars from around the world started dropping in on the Freedmans to conduct research, sleeping on a cot and sometimes staying for a week or two. When the couple moved to an apartment in Rittenhouse Square, they were obliged to rent a second condominium to house part of their ballooning collection. A move to Penn seemed prudent.

The Freedmans have established a searchable electronic database for their collection with over 32,000 tracks in English, Hebrew and Yiddish. Efforts are under way to make them available to the Penn community online.

According to Penn digital library curator David McKnight, the Freedman database receives an average of 1,000 hits a day.

The couple also continues to eagerly hunt for Jewish music, traveling around the world to do so. In Buenos Aires, they had to buy a new suitcase because they found so much Yiddish music. When they arrived in Sweden, they were greeted by three klezmer musicians who accompanied them to a cafe, where they spent the day singing.

Bob said that the inquiries he receives about the collection on a daily basis from around the world validates his hard work in putting the archive together.

"We get requests from cantors, performers, authors, composers, academics, music therapists," Bob said. "But the thing that grips me the most are the requests from what I call 'plain people.' It is, 'I remember the phrase of a song my father used to sing, can you help?' And I turn heaven and earth to try to find these things. Because the sense of loss and the sense of wanting connection comes right through the computer."

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