Susman Kiselgof

Susman (Zinoviy Aronovich) Kiselgof (, ; 1878–1939) was a Russian-Jewish folksong collector and pedagogue associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. Like his contemporary Joel Engel, he conducted fieldwork in the Russian Empire to collect Jewish religious and secular music. Materials he collected were used in the compositions of such figures as Joseph Achron, Lev Pulver, and Alexander Krein. He was the son of a Melamed. He began his efforts to collect Jewish folk music around 1902. In 1913-14 he participated in the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition of S. An-sky. He also became very active in Jewish cultural life in St. Petersburg; in 1908, he was a founding member of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, and was on its board until 1921. It was reprinted several times; the 1923 reprint is available in digital format in the collection of the Yiddish Book Center.

In the early period of the Soviet Union, Kiselgof continued along the same music and education path he had already been on. In 1919, he became the musical consultant, teacher and choirmaster for the newly founded Petrograd Jewish Theater Studio of Alexei Granovsky (later known as GOSET). Some of those musical manuscripts, along with another set by Avraham-Yehoshua Makonovetsky, are currently being digitized by a crowdsourced project organized by the Klezmer Institute called the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP).