The Colburn School Launches Herbert and Trudl Zipper Archives

More than 20,000 artifacts pertaining to the composer/conductor and dancer are now available digitally

The Colburn School has launched a significant new archive of materials pertaining to the lives of Herbert and Trudl Zipper. The collection contains more than 20,000 artifacts, and it took 18 months to get the project off the ground.

Herbert Zipper was a Holocaust survivor who was also a conductor, composer, and educator, and a hall at the Colburn School bears his name. His wife, Trudl Dubsky Zipper, was a dancer, choreographer, costume designer, and artist. She was a member of the famed Bodenwieser Dance Group in the 1920s and 1930s and helped to found the expressionist school of dance.

The archives were donated to Colburn in 2019 by Crossroads School, and in 2022, the Colburn School was awarded a “Save America’s Treasures” grant by the National Park Service (NPS) in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to preserve and make the archives accessible.

Born in Austria in 1904 to a Jewish family, Herbert Zipper was taken to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938. While there, he completed back-breaking labor, but also managed to write songs and poems, alongside the writer Jura Soyfer.

Having been released in 1939, he became the founding conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra, but was then arrested by Japanese forces in 1941. At the end of the war, he joined his wife in America, where he was music director of the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Business Men’s Orchestra.

You can view the digital archives here.

"It has been almost three decades now since Herbert Zipper passed (at age 93) and yet so many of those who knew him speak reverently and acknowledge the profound influence he had upon so many lives," said Paul Cummins, Herbert Zipper's biographer. "Herbert was the soul of integrity. In a world where integrity often seems in short supply, Herbert was a model in all he did and the importance of doing your best and doing it with integrity."

"His life story — from Vienna to Dachau/Buchenwald to Manila to the U.S.A. — was an extraordinary odyssey. I, for one, believe he was a great gift in the life of my family and me. Being allowed by Herbert to write his biography was one of the deep privileges of my life."