Decorated klezmer violins from the Violins of Hope collection.
As the last generation of Holocaust survivors dwindles, the world turns to new ways of protecting their legacy. The Violins of Hope organization aims to do that through powerful stories of resilience based on a private collection of stringed instruments (including violins, violas, cellos and double basses) connected with the Holocaust.
The project, which has become an essential pillar of Holocaust remembrance, will visit New Jersey from Dec. 2 to Dec. 8, presented by Symphony in C and The Jewish Community Relations Council of Southern New Jersey.
The initiative will showcase eight violins from the collection, and will include concerts in Cherry Hill, Dec. 7-8, and an educational program, Dec. 1-6, in various locations around Camden.
Avshi Weinstein, left, and his father, the late Amnon Weinstein, in their Tel Aviv workshop.
On hand will be co-founder Avshalom “Avshi” Weinstein. He and his father Amnon — who died in March, at the age of 84 — co-founded Violins of Hope. Each instrument in the collection, once silenced by the atrocities of Nazi Germany, has been given an individual voice again, restored by the Weinstein family at their workshops in Tel Aviv and Istanbul.
As far as Weinstein recalls, Violins of Hope has never traveled to New Jersey, and he is looking forward to bringing the project here. “People should come because every event is a bit different,” he says. “Every orchestra, community and organization does it in a different way, and always with different places and lectures, so it’s always something to look forward to.”
During the week leading up to the concerts, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Southern New Jersey and its Esther Raab Holocaust Museum & Goodwin Education Center will bring the instruments to schools, libraries and houses of worship in the Camden community. Students will be encouraged to hold the instruments and Weinstein will share stories about each one, making connections with the previous owners.
Before rehearsals of the Dec. 7-8 concerts, Weinstein will present violins to musicians in the symphony, and they will be played during the concerts. “The musicians can sit down and try them, and each chooses his or her own instrument,” he says.
Sometimes he collaborates on programming, but for these concerts, works were chosen by Symphony in C, the Camden-based professional training orchestra led by music director Noam Aviel since the 2023-24 season.
KENNETH BEAN
With Aviel unable to attend due to a personal matter, Kenneth Bean, the symphony’s assistant conductor since 2018, will conduct it in a “Violins of Hope Concert,” Dec. 7 at Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill. The program will include Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major and J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor.
The Dec. 8 concert, at Lahn Social Hall at the Katz JCC in Cherry Hill, will feature a string quartet of Symphony in C musicians. The program will feature Mozart’s Six Preludes and Fugues After J.S. Bach and Bach’s Goldberg Variations Arranged for String Trio.
Weinstein is particularly looking forward to hearing the Beethoven and Mendelssohn selections.
“Mendelssohn is still one of the most known Jewish composers, and all his music was banned during 1933 to ’45,” he says. “And the Beethoven. There is the beautiful story by Elie Wiesel from his book ‘The Night,” about his friend who played parts of the Beethoven violin concerto during the death march, and in the morning, he found him dead and the violin broken. And Wiesel himself played violin and studied it when he was young.”
Weinstein will return to New Jersey with Violins of Hope in January for an initiative with Wharton Arts, New Jersey’s largest independent performing arts education organization.
Two events at NJPAC in Newark in January will begin with a free Jan. 11 “Roundtable Talk With Violins of Hope,” followed, on Jan. 12, by “A Concert for Peace With Violins of Hope” featuring Ranaan Meyer on double bass and Asi Matathias on violin.
“We are trying to arrange that they will play a double bass that belonged to someone who was saved by (Oskar) Schindler,” Weinstein says. “He and his brothers were all the time playing for the Nazis in their parties at night.”
HELEN H. CHA-PYO
Helen H. Cha-Pyo, Wharton Arts’ artistic director, will conduct the organization’s flagship orchestra, the New Jersey Youth Symphony, alongside NJYC Coriste, NJYC Camerata and The Harmonium Choral Society. The program will include two works by Mendelssohn; Paul Frucht’s In Tsyet: Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra (New Jersey premiere); David Winkler’s Paradiso for Violin and Orchestra in Memory of Amnon Weinstein (world premiere); and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.
For Weinstein, Violins of Hope is a passion that commemorates his personal connection to the Holocaust. He is a third-generation survivor who lost hundreds of relatives during World War II.
His grandfather, Moshe Weinstein, was a violinist who had trained as a violin maker in Warsaw in the early 20th century. He was a trusted companion to the world’s most famous violinists, including Itzhak Perlman. “If you ask Perlman who gave him his first violin, it’s my grandfather,” Weinstein says.
Amnon Weinstein apprenticed with his father and went on to study violin-making in Cremona and restoration in France. Avshi began working in his father’s workshop in 1998, and has been trained in the same European traditions.
In 1991, Amnon Weinstein began collecting and restoring instruments that were used during the Holocaust. Many Jewish musicians, of course, died during the Holocaust, but it was a mystery where their instruments had ended up, so Amnon appeared on a radio station and put out a call for people to come forward with any information and instruments. There was a strong response. Many instruments were donated by or bought through family members, including grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who had passed down their instruments.
Shimon Krongold in his music room in Warsaw.
The Zimermann-Krongold violin (Warsaw, 1924) was the first violin to enter the collection. It was made by Yaacov Zimermann, one of the first Jewish violin makers in Warsaw, for Shimon Krongold, an amateur violinist, and it features a Star of David inlay.
A handful of instruments came from clients who had been prominent members of the Palestine Orchestra, which later became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It was founded by Bronislav Hubermann in 1936 as an all-Jewish orchestra of mostly German and Austrian Jews who had lost their positions when the Nazis came to power in 1933. With the founding of the orchestra, Hubermann saved the musicians and their families, totaling close to 1,000 lives.
Some instruments were played by victims of the Holocaust in ghettos, in concentration camps, on cattle cars or in hiding locations. Some were made by Jewish luthiers who were murdered in the concentration camps but their instruments survived. Others were played by klezmer musicians — a culture of Jewish music that the Nazis tried to destroy.
The collection has grown steadily over the years. “We have just over 100 instruments today, many of them with stories, and we are still getting a bit more, from time to time,” Avshi Weinstein says.
Violins make up the majority of instruments that survived the Holocaust because they were small enough to grab quickly, and then conceal. (A typical violin is around 24 inches.) Many were handed over to the Weinsteins in bad condition, ravaged by weather, insect infestations and the passage of time.
The first Violins of Hope concert was in Istanbul in 2000. “It was my father and a very, very close friend of ours who did it,” Weinstein says. “The first big project was in 2012 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This is where we had the first exhibit and concerts, lectures and all that. The second big project was the one in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2015. It was at that one that the PBS documentary was made.”
The documentary, “Violins of Hope: Strings of the Holocaust,” aired on PBS in 2016.
Violins of Hope programs have ranged from from one-off concerts to months-long series of exhibitions, performances and educational initiatives.
AVSHI WEINSTEIN
“We used to have a project every two years or so,” Weinstein says. “Now I have a project every month.”
They are booked through 2028. Weinstein tries to attend every project, even if it means only staying part of the time. “I’m always coming and going but, in the end, I’m married and I have kids, and they should see me every once in a while. For the longer projects, I’ll come once or twice or even three times, but I’m not able to stay the whole time. That’s, unfortunately, impossible.”
Though the outreach is global and the demand is large, the project functions like a grassroots movement. Weinstein leaves it up to the communities to reach out, and goes where he is wanted.
“Whoever talks to me, we have a project,” he says. “I’m not calling people. When people call me, this is how I know where to go and what to do.”
For more information, visit violins-of-hope.com or jcrcsnj.org/violins.
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