Friday Night Live: Violins of Hope
Services and Concert
Join us for a special Friday night prayer service.
The exquisite sounds of numerous violins will echo throughout our Main Sanctuary, their power brought back to life by the Orchestra of St. Luke's in memory of the Holocaust refugees and survivors who saved the precious instruments during their darkest hours.
Join us and be moved by the extraordinary melodies that still resonate from a violin played by an inmate member of the Auschwitz Orchestra; another by one of the last Jews to escape Nazi Europe; an instrument that a young Italian Jew clung to in a forced labor camp; Klezmer violins emblazoned with Stars of David.
The Violins of Hope Exhibition will run from January 27- March 27, 2023 at the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum at Temple Emanu-El. Museum hours are Sunday through Thursday, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
ABOUT THE SERIES:
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.