Sephardic Pizmonim Project

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The Sephardic Pizmonim Project is a foundation dedicated to the scholarship and preservation of the music, called Pizmonim, of the Sephardic-Syrian Jewish community. The project is dedicated to the memory of Cantor Gabriel A. Shrem, the former director of Yeshiva University's Cantorial Institute (Philip and Sarah Belz School of Jewish Music) and cantor of B'nai Yosef Synagogue. The projects goal is to restore and preserve the ancient Jewish songs of the Middle Eastern Jewish communities.

The idea of the project began in the last 1970s when Shrem was offered to teach a course at Yeshiva University. As a tool to teach this course, Shrem recorded all of the pizmonim songs onto tape recorder for classroom distribution. The collection that resulted from these recordings encompassed roughly 70% of the Sephardic pizmonim liturgy and this, in part, is the reason why the musical culture of the Sephardic community is still alive and well.^{[citation needed]} The recordings in this project serves all Syrian Jews today as the official canon of pizmonim.^{[citation needed]}

The Sephardic Pizmonim Project organization rereleased all of Shrem's recordings and issued them onto a large CD collection in September of 2004 selling 5,500 CDs throughout the world. The organisation opened a website in 2006 with the goal of "continuing the work that Gabriel Shrem started and preserving any obscure [Middle Eastern Jewish] tradition possible". In the progress, countless cantors throughout the globe have contacted the organization and have provided recordings to include on his website to enhance the project.