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Robert Bloom was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Julius Bloom, was Pittsburgh's leading cantor who, besides officiating in the city's synagogues, was an outstanding choir director and composer. Reverend Bloom had fled the pogroms that occurred in his native Kiev in the late 19th century, as did his future wife, Ida Fisher. The family was musical; Jennie, one of Bloom's five sisters, was an excellent soprano and pianist and his brother, William, was a violinist who became a member of Walter Damrosch's New York City Symphony and later the New York Philharmonic after the merger of these orchestras. As a boy, Bloom sang in his father's choir and studied several instruments while attending local public schools. He entered Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology as a student of cello and music education in 1925. He was encouraged to take up the oboe seriously by early teachers Joseph Derdyne and Oscar W. Demler, his music teacher at Fifth Avenue High School (who later became the Music Supervisor of the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the conductor of Pittsburgh's All-City Youth Orchestra). With the recommendation of Professor W.O. Schultz, one of his teachers at Carnegie Tech (now called Carnegie Mellon University), Bloom auditioned in 1927 and won a place in the oboe class at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which had been founded just three years earlier.