Artist memorializes Jewish lives lost in Holocaust by restoring violins

Violins of Hope is a project and concert series set up by Israeli master violin maker and player Amnon Weinstein to memorialize Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust by meticulously restoring the surviving violins. The project is dedicated to the hundreds of relatives he never got the chance to meet because they were murdered by Nazis.

So far, Weinstein and his son, Avshalon, who is also a master violin maker, have amassed a collection of over 80 of these very special musical instruments that have been played in concerts by renowned musicians throughout the world, the first of which was in Istanbul in 2001 with just a solo violinist accompanied by a pianist.

One of the most momentous performances was in 2014, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The German government arranged for Weinstein to fly to Berlin with violins from his collection, which were played by Hitler’s former orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker. The audience included the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was then the minister for foreign affairs. It was an act of defiance and restitution, and a powerful way of showing how the spirits of those who were killed still live on.

In 2015, Daniel Levin, fine art photographer and professor, traveled from his home city, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to meet with Weinstein at his studio in Tel Aviv. He wanted to know what a luthier (maker of stringed instruments) like Weinstein does, and how exactly violins that have barely survived the most horrific conditions can be restored to the point where they can once again play music. 

“I was curious about this man, and who would even have the guts to do this, and the skills and the drive,” says Levin, whose 10-day trip was funded by a grant from the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. 

The experience was life changing and it inspired him to compile his photographs with accompanying stories into a book, which he titled Violins and Hope: From the Holocaust to Symphony Hall. Like a rich tapestry that keeps unfolding to reveal unexpected layers and designs, Levin’s book intertwines the stories behind the violins he photographed at Weinstein’s studio with important historical figures and events. 

“It’s a book about the raw uniqueness of music, about photography, and it’s about the birth of the State of Israel and the Holocaust,” he explains.

THE BOOK begins with a deeply personal forward written by Franz Welser-Möst, the Austrian music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, which was touted last year by The New York Times as being “America’s finest (orchestra).” Welser-Möst’s father fought in the German Army in WWII, and this is one reason it was so important for him to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra when they performed a “Violins of Hope” concert in Cleveland in 2015. 

 “I believe, with all my heart and mind, that we as descendants – for myself as an Austrian, for each of us as a citizen of a country in this world, as humans individually and together – must willingly acknowledge and carry, if you will, the moral baggage of the past with us,” he writes. “We can celebrate success and achievement and happiness only by also acknowledging and embracing the bad that society has brought forth. Because, ultimately, each person must bear witness to the fate of everyone around us.”

Upon first meeting Weinstein, Levin describes him looking very much like he had envisioned. 

“I imagined in my fantasy mind’s eye, Geppetto, and I wasn’t disappointed; he’s kind of a Geppetto-like figure, a fantastic face, a biker mustache. He’s a very interesting-looking man and he always has his apron on and these amazing tools.” 

Levin depicts Weinstein as “almost like a pathologist, like a coroner. He tends to open up a case and maybe let it sit there for six months, and just kind of look at it, and not touch it. He’ll take the button off – that’s at the bottom of really any string instrument, a little pointy, round thing – and then he lets light come through the F-holes, those S shapes in the front, and then he puts his eye through that little hole at the bottom and looks in, then he takes the strings off and he takes it apart… he does this whole forensic thing.”

 

Aside from varnish and some minor touch-ups, the restoration process is not about external appearances, it’s about sound. 

“Even a curator of a museum would not approve of Amnon’s restoration. If this was the Smithsonian, you don’t touch those violins. But it was critical that they be touched; touched with love, made playable to the greatest degree they can be so that maybe they even sound better than when they were new, because many of these are not high-end violins. It’s not about just the objects themselves, but the visceral experience of master musicians, and even children playing on them, that’s what it’s about.”

LEVIN REMEMBERS the first time he met Weinstein’s wife, Assi Bielski Weinstein, was when she pulled up on a retro pink bicycle to the falafel shop where he and Weinstein were getting lunch. She worked for many years on the Israeli radio station, Galei Tzahal, and was also a writer and editor. She is the daughter of Asael Bielski, one of the heroic Bielski brothers who formed a partisan resistance group against the Nazis and their cohorts.

From 1942 to 1944, the Bielski brothers fought on the front lines with other volunteers while hiding fellow Jews in the Naliboki forest of northwestern Belarus. They saved approximately 1,250 Jews. Asael died fighting a few months before Assi was born.

Levin explains, “They really became known because they were fighters; they would blow up trains and they would be snipers and kill Nazis. The Bielskis were the leaders. There would even be female partisans who would sneak into power plants in the city and blow them up.”

The 2008 film Defiance documents their story.

One of Levin’s photographs in Violins and Hope shows Weinstein’s studio with an impressive array of violins delicately hung against a wall filled with pictures; it’s like each instrument hangs in suspense, waiting patiently to tell a story too sacred for words. Assi discloses to Levin how a violin maker in the south of France sent them a violin that had been given to him by a worker who was fixing train rails that held cattle cars headed to Auschwitz. A Jewish man threw his violin outside the train’s tiny window and called out to the workers, asking them to keep it safe for him. One of the workmen kept the violin for about 70 years in his attic. After he passed away, his children sold it to a violin maker who contacted Weinstein. 

ASSI RELAYS to Levin the story of how music saved the life of Henry Meyer, who was a well-known child prodigal violinist. When he was 20 years old and lay sick in an Auschwitz infirmary, a Jewish doctor recognized him and switched his identifying number card with that of a corpse so that SS officers could not select him.

Another life-saving violin Assi and Weinstein are still trying to locate is one once owned by a young Romanian boy, Abraham Melamed. A commander of Melamed’s ghetto gave him a violin to play, and he loved the music he performed so much that he took Melamed’s parents off a train on its way to Auschwitz.

Strikingly detailed photographs in Violins and Hope illustrate how each violin reveals its story through its markings, most of which are left visible to preserve the integrity of the history behind them. Violins with delicately inlaid mother of pearl Stars of David prove they once belonged to Jews of a certain period in time, and a number of Klezmers, whose aggressive wounds and worn out bows show they must have played this highly spirited genre of religious folk music. 

A somber photograph of an opened violin reveals a hidden pencil carving of a swastika with the words ‘Heil Hitler 1936’ written in cursive above it. Weinstein surmises that a luthier covertly inscribed this when its Jewish owner brought it in for servicing. Another photograph shows an Auschwitz violin, whose restored sheen and outer beauty belie the fact that it came with ashes still inside of it.

Weinstein was impressed with Levin’s work:

“I must admit that my workshop is a bit very old-fashioned, with heavy furniture and a serious atmosphere. When Daniel Levin entered the workshop, I was quite busy repairing instruments, but told him to feel free to do what he loves so much and is so good at – looking through his lenses and clicking photos. When I saw the first exhibit in Cleveland I was astounded. Could this be the workshop I have lived in all my life? Daniel saw elements I overlooked and details I paid no attention to. Well, I’m thrilled and overjoyed to see my son Avshalom and our world spread out so sensitively – it’ simply beautiful!”

IN THE book, Levin includes a portrait he took of American violinist and conductor, Joshua Bell, holding a famous violin he owns, the 1713 Gibson ex Huberman Antonio Stradivarius. Bronislaw Huberman was a Jewish Polish violinist who was discovered as a child prodigy for his extraordinary musical talent. He was gifted this violin by a Polish count when he was just 14 years old.

Although Huberman’s violin is not in Weinstein’s collection, Levin describes it as “in a way, the ultimate violin of hope.” Known as the ‘Oskar Schindler of musicians,’ for saving almost 1,000 European Jews from Nazi persecution, Huberman traveled throughout Europe to find the most talented musicians to bring to Palestine to set up an orchestra. He paid for 75 highly accomplished musicians, most of whom were already famous, to come to Palestine along with their families. In 1936 he founded the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, which later became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when Israel was declared an independent state in 1948.

Huberman’s Stradivarius violin was stolen from him on two occasions. The first time was in Vienna, where it was returned to him a few days later, and the second time was when he left it in a dressing room in Carnegie Hall in 1936 while performing on another violin. It was not found until 1986, when the man who stole it felt compelled to confess to his crime on his deathbed. Sadly, Huberman was never reunited with his beloved instrument, as he had passed away nearly four decades earlier.

In 2001, Joshua Bell was in a violin shop in London buying strings when he picked up Huberman’s Stradivarius and instantly recognized its sound from having played it before. It had already been sold to a German industrialist who collected violins but didn’t play them. Bell could not imagine the violin being kept imprisoned behind glass and paid almost $4 million to have it in his possession. Bell, who is Jewish, has since played it with the Nashville Symphony during a Violins of Hope concert and with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

When asked about Weinstein’s mission, Levin told the Magazine, “I would say this is really his mission, and it happens – these concerts, whoever performs on them, children, whoever, they bring amazingly deep emotion, but at the same time, underneath it all, not just sorrow, but also hope. They really do.”

“There’s a reason for that word “hope” for him. What Weinstein’s life’s mission is basically saying is, ‘Hitler, you didn’t win.’”

Violins and Hope: From the Holocaust to Symphony Hall will be released in August.