YALA Mini-Grants—music to our ears
When Masha Trius started a GoFundMe several years ago with the goal of buying a rare book of Yiddish folk songs, they were surprised at the enthusiastic support they received.
“I was looking for some hard-to-find Yiddish music to play and I was getting really frustrated with the quality of the sheet music that I was finding,” they explained. “I was trying to get some higher-quality music and all I could find was this anthology—seven volumes. It was ridiculously expensive.”
Masha Trius created Liderbukh with the help of a YALA Mini-Grant
This particular anthology, published by the Hebrew University and collected by Aharon Vinkovetzky, was hard to find; and as Masha learned, expensive—it was listed somewhere in the neighborhood of several hundred dollars. With such a unique resource in their hands, Masha realized they had the opportunity to share the Yiddish folk songs they recalled from their own childhood with others who would appreciate them. With their talents in web and app design, Masha figured they could develop something that would make for easy access and sharing—a virtual tool for those passionate about preserving and remembering these songs.
“I was really shocked by how many people wanted to contribute to this, just so I could have these books,” Masha said, explaining that they’d been able to raise the money over GoFundMe in the matter of days, “and I promised that I would work on digitizing it, because this anthology is very, very hard to find.”
Enter YALA Mini-Grants. As Masha was beginning to develop the website, they were pointed to the YALA program as a way to get support, both monetarily and marketing-wise, by Adam Schwartz of Heritage Judaica—another YALA Mini-Grant recipient.
YALA Mini-Grants are designed as a way to help young adults with new ideas for programs or resources get their passion projects off the ground. Heritage Judaica, Multiracial Jewish Association of Minnesota, the Folk Will Save Us Podcast, and many other local initiatives have partnered up with YALA to bring their ideas to fruition. Masha also mentioned their gratitude for the Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music Archive at the University of Pennsylvania Library in helping them with some of the transcriptions of sheet music.
Masha’s app—Liderbukh—became one such project with YALA’s support. The website, accessible here, launched back in 2018 as a free resource for anyone looking for sheet music for traditional Yiddish songs. For Masha, as an amateur musician themself and an immigrant with ties to Russia and Israel, this music is an important connection to their childhood and memories of music that are tied to a non-American Jewish tradition.
“The subjective experience of playing Jewish music, this particular kind of Jewish music, was very different for me from playing Jazz or Blues or American Folk [because] I didn’t really have to think about it,” they said. “When I started playing Jewish music, it was like—I already know what this is supposed to sound like. It’s in my bones. Now that’s all I play.”
Liderbukh, then, is an incredible free resource acting as a library for songs that may have, for some people, only previously existed in their memories—or as a hard-to-find book of sheet music.
“I think the main person who uses the website is me,” Masha said, laughing. They explained they’ve been working on-and-off on making a new version of the website which would be more collaborative, letting people sign up as contributors who could transcribe and submit new sheet music. “My favorite is when somebody tells me that they use it.”
Visit Liderbukh here for all your music needs!
Do you have an idea for a Jewish program? Are you looking for guidance and support with getting a new project off the ground? Do you want to start something special, but just don’t have the resources? The YALA Mini-Grant program supports new Jewish ideas and helps you incubate your project, with financial resources, promotion, and other support as needed. Learn more here, or email Emma Dunn, YALA Manager.