Songs of Volozhin

In around 2021, when I first got my hands on a copy of Abraham Zvi Idelson's Thesaurus of Jewish Music, I noticed a few melodies in the volume on Eastern European Jewish Folk music that were attributed to Volozhin. As I was studying in Yeshiva at the time, this of course piqued my interest. Many yeshivas are proud of their musical herritage, but few melodies seem to reliably originate in Volozhin. Beneath these melodies in Idelson's thesaurus, I noticed the citation Reshumoth V. 

What was Reshumot?  

Following WWI, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Alter Druyanov, and Yehoshua Chana Ravnitzky created a journal for Jewish enthnographic study, which they called Reshumot. Over the course of the 1920s they published at least six volumes. (After the creation of the state of Israel, the Reshumot journal was revived under a new generation of ethnographic and folklore scholars.)

In volume five of Reshumot, published in 1927, there is an article by Yitzchak Rivkind titled "From the Collections of the Volozhiner." This article has two parts, the first describes the closure of the Volozhin Yeshiva and theater art that was created in response to the closure. The second part is about the Songs of Volozhin. It contains four music scores of songs that were sung in the yeshiva along with some background information. 

The first song in this article is a tune for Chasal Siddur Pesach. The commentary describes how it was a regular practice for the Rosh Yeshiva to host yeshiva students at his house for the Pesach Seder. This version of Chasal Siddur Pesach was sung at these sedarim and it was very popular among the members of the Yeshiva. The author, Yitzchak Rivkind, believed that Rav Itzele Volozhiner either composed the tune or at least adapted the tune for Chasal Siddur Pesach. 

The second song is called Al Tirah Yisrael. It is an original song for which both the tune and the words were written by Rav Itzele Volozhiner. Rivkind suspects that he wrote this song after advocating for the Yeshiva to the Russian government. The song itself tells the Jewish people not to be afraid because of their vulnerable position as a persecuted minority. Instead they should celebrate the Torah and rely upon God. 

There are two more songs at the end of the article that have no commentary associated with them. One of them is called Gut Yom Tov, and is a tune with a repeating refrain of "gut yom tov." The last song is titled The Volozhiner Dance. 

I have scanned the portion of the article on the songs of Volozhin. 

Yitzchak Rivkind, "From the Collections of Volozhin: The Songs of Volozhin," Reshumot vol. 5 (1927): 376–382.

I have also transcribed the four scores and uploaded them to musescore. 

https://musescore.com/user/81422653/sets/12656116

I want to try to do more of these music transcriptions at some point in the future. There are a fair amount of hard to find collections of religious Jewish folk music that might benefit from this transcription.