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Welcome to David Kohan's Jewish Music Archive Wiki!

At the moment, the entire David Kohan Wiki is in a testing phase, open only to carefully selected specialists, until the copyright issues are hopefully resolved. If you want to get access to the wiki and the audio files, please contact Andreas Kennecke. Anyone who gains access to this site automatically agrees not to download, distribute, or use any of the recordings. If you hear a recording that you know is copyright free, please mark it as explained under Help:Contents#Copyright Issues. If you are able to find recordings on other platforms, such as Youtube, please let us know so we can link there. Only these free recordings will later be available to the general public; the fate of all other recordings collected by David Kohan is still under discussion. Suggestions are very welcome.

This is the place where you can listen to more than 600 hours of Jewish music including Yiddish songs and recitations, klezmer music, niggunim, liturgical chant, Hebrew songs and sephardic songs, collected by the hazzan (cantor) and musicologist David Kohan.
The musical material was accumulated during 1945 and 1990. David Kohan had 325 tapes (reels and cassettes) stored in Berlin. Under the supervision of initially Aaron Eckstaedt, continued by Susi Hudak-Lazic, Annegret Böhme digitized the recordings at the Department of Religious Studies, then headed by Prof. Dr. Karl E. Grözinger, at Potsdam University during [2001/2-06?]. Paul Borchert of Potsdam University's IT Department imported those more than 12.000 tracks into David Kohan's Jewish Music Archive Wiki and is the technical mind behind this project. Janina Wurbs worked on adding information of who sings and plays what, as Kohan's catalog of his recordings is said to be lost. Read more about David Kohan and his archive.

Here you see an example of the structure of the articles for the tracks.

The overall structure of the database still lacks a lot. So far, two ways of structuring have been started.
Firstly, the recordings are arranged according to the CD's that resulted from the digitizing process. Actually, this structure is not too helpful to get an overview of the existing material, as these CD's do not match albums. Rather, they are mosaic stones patched together of different sources and performers.
Secondly, a structure based on the workload still necessary has been created which is called "Page status".
More structuring is very much welcome.

The Wiki as a platform was chosen to facilitate the dialogue between academics, musicologists, musicians, Yiddish researchers and who else has valuable statements to describe and analyze those resources of the Jewish music history and practice. In the era of Web 2.0, the creation of a living archive through this interdisciplinary knowledge of specialists worldwide will contribute to further interactive ways of gaining new insights.

In this spirit, take notice that every page has a "discussion" button at the top - please feel absolutely free to use this feature! You do not always have to change the track page right away; in case you are unsure about the information you would like to add or in case a problem arises - use this discussion button. It is a great possibility to reconsider doubtful or arguable data. Of course, this only works if other knowledgable people respond to it...
So far, this button has been used for quick notes; many track titles can be found there on otherwise old trackpages.
For general discussion on the Kohan Wiki, a mailing list will be created soon.

In addition, do not hesitate to correct the currently non native speaker English of the David Kohan Jewish Music Archive Wiki. - This is only a beginning now.

Get started!

• Browse through recordings with some information added (validation needed).
• Listen and please contribute your expert knowledge !