Mandell German Jewish Music Collection

“The true collector is an eternal student,” Eric Mandell wrote about himself in 1963. Forever a student and a teacher, Mandell was passionate about finding and sharing copies of Jewish music from liturgical settings to folk songs. Born in 1902, Mandell was trained as a teacher and cantor in his native country of Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party. His first collection of music, which he tried to preserve by sending to his cousins for safekeeping in Amsterdam, was sadly destroyed. But upon resettlement first in England and then Philadelphia, Mandell managed to rebuild a remarkable collection of musical scores and books. This collection includes musical scores as well as Mandell’s correspondence with a network of cantors and collectors around the world.  

Through a partnership between Gratz College and the University of Pennsylvania, Mandell’s collection will now be available in person at Penn’s Kislak Center of Special Collections and available online here at Grayzel. Click here to read more about Mandell and his collection.

“The Gratz-Mandell Jewish Music Collection amounts to a time capsule of a destroyed world of Jewish sound. Thanks to its survival... we are able to reconstruct and even potentially perform this otherwise lost sacred soundscape.” 
— Arthur Kiron, the Penn Libraries’ Curator of Judaica Collections.