Semer Records, a label started by devoted to publishing the music of Jewish Berlin, survived just six years before the Nazis burned its records, murdered most of the contributing artists, and sent its founder, Hirsch Lewin, to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. For decades, it was assumed that the music of Semer Records vanished in the ashes of Kristallnacht.
But as Jordan Kutzik writes in The Forward, the music has been preserved. And thanks to a new group of Jewish musicians called the Semer Ensemble, audiences can once again hear the remarkably cosmopolitan sounds of Jewish Berlin.