For 15 years, Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, Research Associate on the MESG ERC project, has been collecting and preserving musical heritage. In 2014, she founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive, recording the voices of ageing Moroccan Jews, and particularly of women's oral traditions. Last week her work was featured in the New York Times in the context of the dwindling community of Judeo-Spanish Moroccan Jews, whose traditions and music are heavily impacted from emigration and dissolution of the original communities. As Valerie Bengio said, the daughter of one of Elbaz' most important informants, who recently passed away at 91: “It would mean betraying her to not share her legacy,” her daughter, Valérie Bengio, told Dr. Paloma Elbaz in the apartment where her mother lived from 1967 until her death. “To leave things untouched is to let them die.”
