Spector (Spektor) (née Lichtenberg)Johanna (23 March 1915, Libau — 14 January 2008) — pianist, pedagogue, ethnomusicologist, ghetto inmate.
Johanna Spector was born into an aristocratic family. She graduated from the Jewish Gymnasium in Liepāja, the Conservatory in Vienna, and subsequently the Academy of Music and Fine Arts there. She returned to Latvia shortly before the Second World War.
With the arrival of the Nazis, she and members of her family were confined in the Liepāja ghetto. In 1943, she was transferred to Kaiserwald, and in 1944 to Stutthof and the Burggraben camp, where she survived a death march. During the Holocaust, she lost her husband, brother, and parents. She was liberated by British forces in May 1945.
Immediately after liberation, she processed and documented songs she had heard in the ghetto and prepared the collection Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps of Latvia and Lithuania (Vienna, 1947).
In 1947, she emigrated to the United States, where she devoted herself to the study of Jewish music. In 1950, she received a doctoral degree from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and in 1960 a Master’s degree in anthropology from Columbia University in New York. She taught for two years at an Academy of Music and worked as a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 1954, Johanna Spector returned to New York and became a lecturer in musicology at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she worked for more than thirty years. In 1962, she founded the Department of Ethnomusicology, specialising in the music and cultural traditions of Jewish communities of India, Yemen, and other regions of the Middle East, and headed the department until 1985.
She was the author of several books and numerous articles for journals, encyclopaedias, and textbooks, as well as a number of high-level documentary films on the music and culture of Jewish communities of the East that were largely unknown or undervalued in the West. She assembled a collection of more than 10,000 recordings of religious and folk music from the communities she studied.
Johanna Spector was a member of many prestigious professional organisations, including the American Anthropological Association, the American Musicological Society, and the International Council for Traditional Music. From 1974 to 1978, she served as president of the Society for Asian Music, and in 1971 founded the Society for the Preservation of Samaritan Culture.
She received the “Golden Eagle” awards for her documentary films About the Jews of Cochin, India (1979), The Shanwar Telis or Bene Israel of India (1979), The Jews of Yemen, a vanishing culture (1986), as well as the Margaret Mead Award for the film 2,000 Years of Freedom and Honour: The Cochin Jews of India (1992).
Works:
Ghetto und KZ-Lieder aus Lettland und Litauen. Vienna, 1947.