Jacob completed law school at Moscow University, but he never practiced, preferring his piano studies.

He studied at the Moscow Conservatory of Music from 1901 to 1906, under many prominent teachers including Taneyev and Ippolito-Ivanov.

He was also very interested in preserving the unique melodies and music scales of Jewish religious and secular folk tunes.

With the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution, Weinberg spent two months in prison and then fled with his wife Theresa (née Bernstein) and his only child, a son, Walter, in 1922 to Palestine (now Israel).

[7] Weinberg produced concert versions of his opera The Pioneers at Carnegie Hall in 1941 and 1947, and at the Mecca Temple (now New York City Center) in the 1930s.

In addition, there was a performance in Berlin, Germany on September 5, 1938, by the Kulturbund, with the soprano Mascha Benya in one of the leading roles.

The artists fled to the US and survived but Kurt Singer, the illustrious head of the Kulturbund, which organized such concerts, could not escape in time and was murdered in Auschwitz.

He was very interested in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and set it to music for a chorus and in three other non-singing versions.

After Jacob's death, Theresa donated his music papers to Jacob Michael, the collector and philanthropist, whose foundation, in turn, donated the collection to the National Library of Israel, which is located on the campus of Hebrew University at Givat Ram, in Israel.

There are over 10,000 pages in this archive which has been carefully curated by its director, Dr. Gila Flam, a distinguished musicologist.

In addition to being Jacob's helpmate and supporter, Theresa Bernstein Weinberg was a gifted watercolor artist and avid maker of scrapbooks.

In 1960 she formally signed a paper donating 67 scrapbooks of her clippings (of Jacob's work and also popular culture) to the NY Public Library system.