On this Shabbat prior to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of the violins that will be a part of the Violins of Hope exhibition — all instruments that survived the Holocaust — will join us and its story will be shared.
with:
Max Beker played his violin in some of the world’s most unusual musical ensembles, from the Tango Orchestra in Stalag VIIIA prisoner of war camp to the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra in Bavaria.
The instrument that made that journey with him - and wound up in his post-WWII home in Brooklyn - is one of the treasured Violins of Hope that Temple Emanu-El expected would be on display this month at our Bernard Museum and played in a special concert in our sanctuary.
Although the arrival of these instruments that survived the darkest days of the Jewish people is delayed until 2023, we are honored to welcome Max’s precious violin as a preview at a special service commemorating the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau on Friday, January 21.
Please join us to hear from Auschwitz survivor Rosa Plawner and to hear the stirring melodies this precious violin still produces and feel the emotions it evokes.
We look forward to the Violins of Hope exhibition, coming in 2023.
This program is sponsored by the Tisch family.
We are grateful for support of Violins of Hope programming from:
Robert B. Menschel and Richard Menschel
Betsy Cohn, in memory of Alan D. Cohn
The Rahm Family Fund
The Violins of Hope have traveled the world… Now they’re coming to New York City!
In the late 1980s, a customer entered the shop of Amnon Weinstein, a young Tel Aviv violin maker, asking for his old instrument to be restored. When Weinstein opened the case, he found ashes coating the bow: The customer had survived Auschwitz because the Germans had assigned him to the death camp orchestra that played as prisoners were herded from cattle cars to gas chambers. The man hadn't played it since.
Weinstein was thunderstruck. Hundreds of his own relatives — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — had died in the Holocaust. To handle one of those instruments was too much. "I could not. I could not," he says.
Finally, he did . . . and then began restoring other violins that survived:
● One carried out of Dachau when its owner was liberated.
● Another thrown from a death train by a French musician crying out, “Where I’m headed, I won’t need this.”
● The Brender instrument that traveled with a Romanian prodigy through a hard labor camp and then into woods, where he fought with Jewish partisans.
● Several belonged to musicians who smuggled them out of Germany when they escaped and ultimately played them in the Palestine Orchestra.
Over the past two decades, dozens of these extraordinary instruments that embody the harshest moments in Jewish history have been refurbished, restrung and brought back to life by Amnon and his son Avshalom. They tell a tale of torment and endurance, of the power of music and the importance of memory. They are our Jewish story.