GSN:

Eighty-one year-old Lionel Ziprin is on a holy mission: To get out in the world the recordings his grandfather made a half-century ago, on the Lower East Side. The grandfather, Naftali Zvi Margolis Abulafia, a prominent Orthodox rabbi, was among the founders of The Home of the Sages of Israel. At some point in the early 1950�s, Margolis Abulafia let his grandson�s eccentric friend Harry Smith set up a studio in his yeshiva. Ziprin�s grandfather shelled out $35,000 in 1954, to have vinyl LP�s produced. Though the rabbi didn�t speak English and Smith didn�t speak Yiddish, the two recorded almost every day for two years, yielding 15 different LP�s. Eight were of Rabbi Abulafia telling stories in Yiddish and seven were of his singing liturgical songs in Hebrew. A thousand copies of the 15-LP collection were pressed….The rabbi�s singing style was a wonderful goulash of Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Arabic flavors, according to Yale Strom, a musician, filmmaker and folklorist dedicated to Jewish culture…Rabbi Abulafia passed away in February 1955, shortly after the records had been made. He was in his 80�s. Ziprin says that a few days before he died, his grandfather instructed him to make sure the records got out in the world. But Ziprin�s mother and uncle wouldn�t let him distribute the records, because they didn�t want the rabbi�s voice �booming from some record store on 14th Street….Ziprin is hoping some record company or Jewish sound archive will want to make CD�s and share Rabbi Abulafla�s recordings with the rest of the world. �If my grandfather�s voice wants to be heard, it will flnd its way into the world with everyone who should hear it,� Ziprin says in resignation. �These records have a destiny. I don�t know what their destiny is.�