Based in Paris, the European Institute of Jewish Musics (IEMJ) was created in 2006 by the French Judaism Foundation, the Yuval association and the Henriette Halphen Foundation. Under the auspices of the musicologist Hervé Roten, the institute’s goals are the preservation and dissemination of the Jewish musical heritage for a wide public.

Main mission

• Collecting archives donated by different families and institutions
• Digitizing and diffusing the different musical collections of the Henriette Halphen media library on line (80,000 music files, 380,000 pages of score, thousands of photos, videos and different archives)
• Developing its own musical publishing division (publication of about 30 CD albums and 50 music scores)
• Holding different conferences and musical workshops for a wide audience.
• Regularly organizing or presenting concerts and live shows

Date of last (physical) meetings

• The night of theology – 4th edition, Thursday January 30th, 2020. An evening dedicated to relations between music and religion
• Cycle of lectures : Music and religion, Monday 3rd of December 2019: as part of the cycle of lectures of the IESR dedicated to religious music, Hervé Roten will present a wide panorama of Jewish liturgical musical practices.
• Jewish Music: When Singular is Plural, a lecture by Hervé Roten, Director of the European Institute of Jewish Music, at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome (ITALY), in the framework of the session Art as/in Dialogue: Jewish and Christian Music
• Symposium in Hannover : Magnified and Sanctified, The Music of Jewish Prayer II, Sunday 12th September 2019 : Hervé Roten’s conference : “Psalm recitation in the Spanish-Portuguese rite (France): formulation processes and musical syntax”.
• Musica Judaica Symposium : Jewish music between oral and written traditions,
• Sunday 14th of July 2019: round table with Diana Matut (Halle Wittenberg/Heidelberg), Martha Stellmacher (European Centre for Jewish Music, Hannover) and Mark Kligman (University of California, Los Angeles) about : “The future of Jewish music collections”
• Monday 15th of July 2019: conference “The influence of Western written music on the French Sephardic-Portuguese traditions in the 19th century”

Current projects

• Development of the European network of Jewish music (3 partner countries at present: France, Italy and Spain).
• Redesign of the website into a true European portal accessible in March 2021 in 5 languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Italian)
• Development of the program “Jewish Radio Memory”.
• Digitization, cataloguing and putting online of more than 2,000 new archive documents (audio, scores, photographs, videos, etc.).
• Edition of new CDs and music scores.
• Preparation of the yearly EIJM gala concert and other musical events.

Membership and communication

The Institute is an association to which you must contribute to become a member. Each year several dozen people join the association in order to support it financially.

Our members – and our public in general – are very varied: musicians, religious people, scientists, the general public, etc.

Our website iemj.org offers each year to nearly 100.000 visitors from all over the world access to more than 1.000 articles and hundreds of hours of music online (background articles, biographies, playlists, concerts, catalog of our collections…).

We also send a weekly newsletter in French to 5,000 people and a monthly newsletter in English to nearly 700 others.

What are your goals for the next three years?

Continue our work to preserve and disseminate Jewish musical heritage in all its forms and for all audiences. To allow the widest possible public access to this unique heritage through our web portal, which is probably one of the most important online resource centre on Jewish music in Europe.

Who runs your organisation?

The main supporters of the EIJM are :

The Fondation du Judaïsme Français, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the Rothschild Foundation, the Rotschild Fooundation Hanadiv, the Henriette Halphen Foundation, the Yuval Association, the Alliance Israélite Universelle…

Name and email of the coordinator of your organisation

Ethnomusicologist, Officer of the Ordre of Arts and letters, PhD in musicology at Paris University Sorbonne, prize-winning graduate from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, Hervé Roten is the director of the European Institute for Jewish Music since its creation in 2006.

Mail: hroten@iemj.org