JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

eregi, oszkár
Bibliography: Ha-Olam (Feb. 28, 1950); Tidhar, 13 (1963),
4223–24.
[Getzel Kressel]
BEREGI, OSZKÁR (1876–1966), Hungarian actor, famous
for his Shakespearean roles. Beregi worked for three years with
Max Reinhardt in Berlin and became a member of the Pest
National Theater in 1899. Nationalist elements brought about
his dismissal in 1910 and he went to Vienna. By 1925 he was
acting in Hollywood and appeared in Anything Can Happen
(1952), Call Me Madam (1953), and Desert Legion (1953).
BEREGOVO (Cz. Berehovo; Hg. Beregszász), city in Sub-
Carpathian Ruthenia (now in Ukraine). Toward the end of
the 18th century Jews were first permitted to settle there on
the estates of the counts Schoenborn and to pursue trade.
Most of them originated from Poland. By 1795 there was an
organized community with a synagogue and ḥevra kaddisha.
Abraham Judah ha-Kohen *Schwarz officiated as rabbi from
1861 to 1881, and Solomon Sofer (Schreiber) from 1884 to 1930.
A Hebrew elementary school was opened after 1918, while
Beregovo was within Czechoslovakia. There were 4,592 Jews
living in Beregovo in 1921 and 5,865 (out of a total population
of 19,379) in 1941. They owned 16 factories, three flour mills,
and two banks, and were represented in the professions by 22
doctors and 17 lawyers. Most of the Zionist parties and youth
were active in Beregovo. A number of Jews owned vineyards,
and supplied the international market as vintners. After the
Hungarian takeover in 1938, the Jews were deprived of their
business licenses. Five hundred males were drafted into labor
battalions and perished on the eastern front. In 1941 about
250 local Jews without Hungarian citizenship were deported
to the German-occupied Ukraine and murdered there. In the
winter of 1944 a ghetto and Judenrat were established, and in
mid-May 1944 about 11,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz,
among them 3,600 from Beregovo with the others from the
surrounding area. The big synagogue was confiscated while a
service was being held during Passover 1959 in order to house
the local theater. After that time, services were held in a rented
room. The number of Jewish families was estimated at 300 in
1970. Presumably most left in the 1990s.
Bibliography: Y. Erez (ed.), Karpatorusyah (1959); Yedi’ot
Yad Vashem, nos. 10–11 (1956), 20, 31. Add. Bibliography: PK
Tshekhia, S.V.
[Oskar K. Rabinowicz / Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)]
BEREGOVSKI, MOSHE (1892–1961), Soviet Russian musicologist.
Born in the Ukraine, Beregovski was the son of a
melammed and reader (ba’al kore) and sang in the synagogue
choir, where he received his first musical training. He studied
composition at the Leningrad Conservatory and participated
in the field expeditions of the late 1910s. He taught music and
conducted a choir at the Jewish folk music society in Kiev. In
1918 he founded and directed the music section of the Jewish
Culture League in Kiev and in 1927 began to collect and study
Jewish folk music at the Faculty of Jewish Culture of the Ukranian
Academy of Sciences. From 1928 to 1941 he was the head
of the Folk Music Division of the Jewish Culture League and
the Folklore Department of the Kiev Conservatory. By the beginning
of World War II the folk music department had more
than 1,200 cylinder recordings of 3,000 items and more than
4,000 transcriptions, of which more than 600 were recorded
by Beregovski, as well as the collections of *An-Ski and Joel
*Engel. In 1944 he received his diploma in music in Moscow
for his thesis on Jewish instrumental music. In 1946 his doctoral
work on musical theater and his thesis were rejected because
of elements of Western culture which he described. In
1949 the department of Jewish culture was closed and in 1950
Beregovski was arrested and imprisoned for five years. After
his release he tried to publish his work but could not do so for
political reasons. He had written most of his projected fivevolume
study of East European Jewish folk music and given
it to his family before his arrest. Most of his recordings and
writings survived WWII and are kept in several institutions in
the Ukraine. His five volumes include: (1) workers’ and revolutionary
songs of the 1905 period, domestic and army songs
(published in 1934 under the title Yevreyskiy musikalny folklor
and in its Yiddish edition (in Latin characters) as Jidisher
Muzik Folklor); (2) love and family songs; (3) klezmer music;
(4) songs without words; (5) music of the Purimshpil. These
are all being published in the U.S., Russia, and Israel. In 1938
Beregovski published another collection of Yiddish songs from
several sources under the tittle Yidishe Folkslider, edited with
Itzik *Fefer (1938), which contained 298 items influenced by
Soviet ideology.
Beregovski was the first ethnomusicologist to record in
the field with a recording machine the oral traditions of East
European Jews. The material he collected between 1914 and
1948 includes songs of the Holocaust. He was a pioneer in
addressing the question of modes and context in the study
of Jewish folk music. Beregovski’s extensive work represents
the rich musical life of Jews in Russia and the Ukraine before
the Holocaust and established the basis of modern studies of
this material. The following of his works appeared posthumously:
Old Jewish Folk Music (ed. M. Slobin, 1982); Jewish
Instrumental Folk Music (ed. M. Slobin, R. Rothstein. and M.
Alpert, 2001); Evreiske Narodnye Musikalno-Teatralnye Predstavlenia
(2001).
[Gila Flam (2nd ed.)]
BERENBAUM, MICHAEL (1945– ), U.S Holocaust scholar
who played a prominent role in what he describes as the
“Americanization” of the Holocaust: the transformation of a
sacred Jewish memory into a significant part of the conceptual
and physical landscape of the American public culture.
Berenbaum was born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated
at Hebrew-speaking New York yeshivot, Queens College
(B.A., 1963), the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, Boston University, and Florida State University,
completeing his Ph.D. as a student of Richard Ruben-
408 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3