Songs of the ghettos, concentration camps, and World War II partisan outposts
Ghetto Songs
By the Ghetto Gate (Baym geto toyerl)
Kovno ghetto, Lithuania, September 1941
Lyrics by: Avrom Akselrod
Music by: Mark Warshawsky
Language: Yiddish
Performed by an unknown singer, Bavarian displaced persons camp, ca. 1946
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By the Ghetto Gate
A topical song about food smuggling in the Kovno ghetto, By the Ghetto Gate draws on the melody of the much-loved “Yiddish alphabet song,” Oyfn pripetshik (At the Hearth). Lyricist Avrom Akselrod, a…
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German and Lithuanian guards search Jewish women returning from forced labor outside the ghetto. Kovno, Lithuania, wartime. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
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One page from the Kovno diary of Tamara Lazerson. In this entry, Lazerson has transcribed the lyrics of the song By the Ghetto Gate, one of several Yiddish ghetto songs which she recorded in her diary. —Tamara Lazerson-Rostovsky
German and Lithuanian guards search Jewish women returning from forced labor outside the ghetto. Kovno, Lithuania, wartime.
—United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
One page from the Kovno diary of Tamara Lazerson. In this entry, Lazerson has transcribed the lyrics of the song By the Ghetto Gate, one of several Yiddish ghetto songs which she recorded in her diary.
—Tamara Lazerson-Rostovsky
A topical song about food smuggling in the Kovno ghetto, By the Ghetto Gate draws on the melody of the much-loved “Yiddish alphabet song,” Oyfn pripetshik (At the Hearth). Lyricist Avrom Akselrod, a refugee who had fled Poland at the start of World War II, wrote a number of parodic verses in the ghetto. He was killed in July 1944, when German militiamen set fire to his underground hiding place.
Recording Source
Yad Vashem/USHMM recorded sound archive
