50 episodes of the much loved Jewish radio fixture of the 70s, 80s and 90s are now available on demand to mark its 50th anniversary

Jonathan Freedland, go-to Jewish journalist and pundit, has given BBC Sounds 50 recordings (from over 1,000!) of You Don’t Have to be Jewish, the programme his late father, broadcaster and journalist Michael Freedland, developed and fronted. Broadcast weekly on BBC Radio London, YDHTBJ ran for more than two decades, starting in 1971, and transformed the weekend. For many, Sunday mornings didn't start until they heard the plangent opening strains of the solo fiddle from the title song of Fiddler on the Roof, declaring a new episode of YDHTBJ.

Now, 50 years later, listeners can once again revel in the same excitement online. The tapes feature a range of superb interviewees, including Abba Eban, Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Amos Oz (interviewed by an 18-year-old Jonathan), Yitzhak Rabin, Yehudi Menuhin and many more. There were in-depth single subject programmes too, on topics such as the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Leonard Bernstein and the death of Golda Meir.

So where did Jonathan come by the recordings? The precious quarter-inch tapes were stashed all over his father's house – a solution, it would seem, to his wife's request to throw at least some of them out… Jonathan gathered the audio treasure, which he says was "in mint condition", and his own son, 19-year-old Jacob, has digitised them so that the team at BBC Archives could put them online. Head over to BBC Sounds now to hear Michael Freedland create a world "through Jewish eyes, but not necessarily for Jewish ears", featuring the Jewish community in London, as well as the voices of so many well known, and not so well known, personalities.

By Judi Herman

You Don’t Have to be Jewish is now available to stream at bbc.co.uk/programmes/p098cwkl.