Restorer Amnon Weinstein in his workshop. For information about ”Violins of Hope” events, concerts and programs, including a downloadable Teacher’s Guide, visit violinsofhoperva.com. (Photo courtesy Virginia Holocaust Museum)
Amnon Weinstein wants to tell the story of the Holocaust, one violin at a time.
“This is the biggest triumph of the Jewish spirit,” says Weinstein, an 82-year-old luthier and restorer, by phone from his workshop in Tel Aviv, Israel. “To me, these violins speak for 6 million people, and there’s nothing stronger than that.”
Weinstein’s “Violins of Hope” project showcases instruments collected and restored in his workshop — violins that were used by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust. These instruments have been authenticated, and their unique, often heart-wrenching stories confirmed, by Amnon and his son, Avshalom, aka Avshi.
“My father was determined to reclaim his lost heritage,” Avshi writes in a statement. “He started locating violins that were played by Jews in the camps and ghettos, painstakingly piecing them back together so they could be brought to life again on the concert stage and serve as a symbol of hope.”
The violins have traveled across the world, visiting U.S. cities such as Cleveland, Los Angeles and Nashville. Now, nearly 60 of these instruments can be seen, and heard, in various venues throughout Richmond.
Weinstein says it all started with his father, Moshe, a Polish master violinist and luthier who collected German-made violins when they were being abandoned by Jewish survivors after World War II. “It was a boycott of Germany, including violins, bows. People would come to my father and say, ‘If you don’t buy this, I will break it.’ So, my father bought them all.”
“Violins of Hope” started 20 years ago when a customer — a survivor of Auschwitz — brought in a violin played in the concentration camp. Weinstein put out a call for more like it, and “it was like a snowball,” he says.
“Amnon was brilliant in naming it the ‘Violins of Hope,’ because it’s so relevant to today’s atmosphere of racial divisions,” says Sam Asher, the executive director at the Virginia Holocaust Museum, which will display selected violins from the collection, along with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. “These instruments represent so many lives, and so many stories about what people went through.”
Some violins were played in camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz. “One of these that we have here is called the Auschwitz violin,” Asher says, “and that ties in with our permanent exhibit on Auschwitz. The violin was played when slave laborers were marched off to their assignments.”
The collaboration between the three museums is unprecedented, Asher says, but it takes three venues to address this topic. “It gave us three different locations, all with different stories we could tell,” he says. “The Holocaust is such a difficult topic. So hard to grasp, these big numbers — like 500,000 children who were murdered. It’s so hard to understand. But if you can hear or see the story of one violin, if you can hear the violins played in concert, it can affect you and it’s something you’ll carry for the rest of your life.”
“For me, every violin, I’m restoring it and creating new evidence,” Weinstein says. “And when people hear it, they can hear it taking its life back. This is proof that you can’t break the spirit of people.”
The Richmond Symphony featured the instruments in concerts at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart and St. Mary’s Catholic Church earlier in September. Avshi was in attendance, along with local Holocaust survivors.
The violins will also be featured in concerts slated for the Weinstein JCC on Sept. 26 (now sold out), Congregation Beth Ahabah on Oct. 17, and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture on Oct. 24.
The concerts and the diversity of venues — concert halls, synagogues, churches — are “a must” to host the violins, Weinstein says. “The violin must be in the hands of the violin player, and not in the closet. Because the violin can speak. Because every violin has another story to tell.”
