His published collections, mostly only released after his death, remain important sources of Jewish music from the late Russian Empire and early Soviet period.

Beregovsky was born in 1892 in Termakhivka [uk] hamlet, Radomyshl district, Kiev Governorate in the Russian Empire (today in Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine).

[2] As a child he received a traditional education in a Cheder, studied in a Jewish reformed school and had Russian tutors as well; he also participated as a boy-chorister in a local synagogue.

In around 1929 he became head of the Musical Folklore section of the newly established Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture (Russian: Институт еврейской пролетарской культуры), which was also based at the AUAS.

[2][1] In 1938 he published a collection of Jewish folksongs and composed Soviet Yiddish songs with the poet Itzik Feffer titled Yidishe folkslider.

[5][6][8] His writings often contained the type of polemics typical of academic works produced in the Stalin era; he often accused Russian Empire and American Jewish musicologists of "petty bourgeois reactionary" attitudes and attacked the basis of their conclusions.

[12] Following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, Beregovsky and many academics from the AUAS were evacuated to Ufa in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

[2] On 7 February 1951 he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years of forced labour for anti-Soviet propaganda, agitation, and participation in a counterrevolutionary organization (the Kultur Lige).

[2][1][6][4] During his final months in hospital, the Canadian-American Yiddish song collector and folklorist Ruth Rubin travelled to the USSR and attempted to meet Beregovsky.

[12][3] His collected materials and writings about Jewish folk music, analyzed with greater rigour than his predecessors, are invaluable and brought these genres to the attention of the wider world of ethnomusicology.

[12][13][4] Unfortunately as a result of Stalinist policy his research was repressed during his lifetime, and shifting priorities in later eras meant that it was largely neglected, although not as completely as the work of some of his contemporaries.

[12] Beregovsky's archive of wax cylinders, many from the pre-WWI Jewish Ethnographic Expedition directed by S. An-sky, was thought by many to have been destroyed during World War II, but was found to be in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv in the 1990s.

Beregovsky's collections of melodies have made their way into the repertoire of many current-day klezmer musicians, including recordings by Joel Rubin, Joshua Horowitz, Alicia Svigals, Pete Rushefsky, Brave Old World, and Veretski Pass.