Rescued violins sing of hope
Wharton Arts offers concert with instruments saved from the Shoah
We all know that everybody has a story. Every Holocaust survivor has an extraordinary story, by definition; they all involve horror, unimaginable pain, and a surprising bit of pure luck.
It seems that even the objects that survived the Shoah have stories. Even — maybe particularly — the musical instruments, with their near-magical power to make song from wood and horsehair.
Some violins — some of them hundreds of years old — made it through and out of concentration camps, even when their owners did not.
On January 12, Wharton Arts will present “A Concert for Peace” at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Eight of those extraordinary violins will be there, visible to the audience, and players will draw music from four of them. (See below.)
Wharton Arts is a nonprofit music education center whose mission statement is “We provide award-winning performing arts education for students of all ages and backgrounds because we believe in the power of music and its impact on individuals and their communities.” It’s open to all students, of all backgrounds and abilities; it encourages hard work, recognizes talent, and rewards openness, creativity, and persistence.
Helen H. Cha-Pyo of Morristown is Wharton Arts’ artistic director and principal conductor. She’ll lead the concert.
Courtney Pantirer of Short Hills is on Wharton Arts’ board; her husband, David Pantirer, is the grandson of Murray Pantirer, a Holocaust survivor who devoted much of his life to Holocaust education, driven by the understanding that the more people understand about it, the less likely it is to happen again, and that it is necessary, if good is to triumph over evil, that it never happen again.
Last week, the two women talked about the program, and the violins.
The postwar chapter of the story began about 20 years ago, when someone brought a violin to show master luthier Amnon Weinstein.
Mr. Weinstein, who had a workshop in Tel Aviv, and who died earlier this year, was the link in a family that so far has three luthiers — his father, Moshe, and his son, Avshalom — Avshi for short.
“He was shown the violin and asked to restore it,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. In order to assess a violin’s condition, a necessary step before beginning any work, a luthier must carefully take it apart and examine it. “When he opened it, he saw black ashes,” she said. “He knew that those ashes weren’t regular dust.
“The family that brought it said that it had once belonged to a family member who had survived the Holocaust and had played the violin in one of the camps.”
The Nazis sometimes made talented musicians play for them. At times it was to make it look as if nothing bad was going on, at times it was to exert power, most times it was sadism. “They were so cruel,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “Sometimes the Jewish musicians would have to play march music as their fellow Jews walked into the gas chambers.” Maybe the music was to calm the victims so their murderers didn’t have to bother to subdue them. Maybe it was to cover their screams. Or maybe it was for the sheer exercise of power. Pure evil.
“At the moment when Amnon saw the violin, he realized that there must be others that survived, even if their owners perished,” Ms. Pantirer said. “So he got the word out, asking if anyone else knew of any others.
“That’s how the collection started.”
And that’s also how the touring concert called Violins of Hope started.
“Now they have a bit more than 100 violins, a couple of violas, and a cello or two,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “They’re not all playable. Of the eight we’re getting, at least four or five are in very good or excellent condition.”
“A lot of them have Jewish stars or Nazi symbols on them,” Ms. Pantirer said. “Each instrument comes with the story of the person who played it, in a concentration camp or a ghetto. Each has a story to tell, and each comes with a story card.”
“The Jewish musicians in Europe were among the finest group of classical players and klezmer musicians,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “Some of them had really good instruments. Some were from the 1700 or 1800s.”
The concert will offer both music and education about the Holocaust. “The Shoah Foundation is loaning us clips of interviews of people, Holocaust survivors, talking about how music saved them,” Ms. Pantirer said. “They are real stories about the moment they were chosen to play in the orchestra — cellists, trumpet players, violinists — and the time they almost were not chosen, they were not good enough, but others rallied around them.
“The stories are tough, some of them are hard to listen to, but we didn’t want to put words into the survivors’ mouths. We wanted to be sure that audiences heard from them directly.”
The project started in 2018. “There were about 11 arts organizations in the state that convened to bring the Violins of Hope to the entire state,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “It was going to start in Cherry Hill and go all the way to Bergen County. We were one of those organizations.
“It was set for October 2020.” But the pandemic intervened.
“In 2022, we all got an email saying that Avshi was ready to tour again. I followed up, because I feel that Holocaust education is so important.
“We have 2,000 students. We can’t do Holocaust education for all of them. But we held two online Holocaust education days for the performers who will be working on this music.
“Part of Wharton Arts’ mission is that we are here to do music education and to perform.
“For me, as artistic director, I have to be sure that what we do has meaning beyond music education. Violins of Hope is an important concert.”
Many arts organizations, like many in a wide range of fields, suffered during the pandemic. Some of them could not manage to re-engage with Violins of Hope. Wharton could.
It’s not only about Holocaust education; it’s also about learning, performing, working, and being comfortable in an intergenerational setting, Ms. Cha-Pyo continued.
“We will have the 100-piece New Jersey Youth Symphony, the 100-voice New Jersey Youth Chorus — both are part of Wharton— and the 80-person Harmonium Choral Society, an intergenerational group from Morristown.
“The majority of the musicians are high-school students. The youngest are in eighth grade. And the chorus is all high-school students.
Given all that, even though the other groups no longer could participate, “I didn’t want to pass on the opportunity to get the Violins of Hope to our students and share it with the wider community,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said.
“We’re working with the Holocaust education department at the federation,” Ms. Pantirer said — that’s the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest. The program the musicians had to take included “descendants of Holocaust survivors telling their family stories, showing pictures, giving testimony.
“And I’m looking around and I see African Americans and Asians and Indians and whites. The students come from all different backgrounds, races, religious backgrounds. Wharton is not a Jewish organization and they’re taking upon themselves the job of getting rid of misinformation and really educating these students.
“I think it’s great. And it gives the students even more meaning when they play the concert.”
Tickets are not expensive — they start at $18. The goal is to make the concert as accessible as possible for as many people as possible. But they are entirely free to Holocaust survivors and their aides.
“We’re working with the federation on this, and we’re bringing a significant number of survivors,” Ms. Pantirer said. “One of them is 103.”
“For me, telling the stories of the violins is from the oral tradition in Jewish culture,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “That’s what I’m trying to model by having generations together on stage. There is a sense of passing the story down to the next generation. The 200 students who have been working on the concert for the last eight weeks have been learning so much.”
Before the program, there will be “an evening of stories and songs of hope at the Chabad in Short Hills,” Ms. Pantirer said.
“Avshi will be there, and he’ll talk about all of the eight violins on display. He will talk about the genesis of this program — how his father collected them. Amnon said, ‘I want these violins to be seen and heard, so that they can continue to make music when their owners have perished. Every concert when this music is played will be a victory against hatred and evil.’
“Amnon wanted the music to be spread as far as possible.”
In order to do that, it is necessary to allow these expensive, irreplaceable instruments to travel. “It is wonderful to see luthiers so relaxed about these instruments. That’s because they believed they’re not museum pieces, meant to be shared only with the very powerful.
“Avshi really believes in these violins of hope.”
Before the program begins, the violins will be displayed in a big conference room above the theater. “We will display them throughout the concert; when it comes to the piece from Schindler’s List, four violinists will come down from the orchestra and take four of the eight.”
The evening’s program will include music by Felix Mendelssohn; the New Jersey premier of Paul Frucht’s “In Tsyet: Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra,” the world premiere of David Winkler’s “Paradiso for Violin and Orchestra in Memory of Amnon Weinstein,” and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.
“My husband’s grandfather was on Schindler’s List,” Ms. Pantirer said; it’s an enormously emotionally evocative moment in the program.
Most of the time, the eight rescued violins will sit mute, but four students each will play one of them during the “Schindler’s List” piece. When they first played those violins, in front of other students, in a rehearsal that “had been pretty rowdy,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said, the room went dead quiet; it reverberated with emotion rather than sound. “We were all in awe at that moment.
“Avshi said that his father said that we don’t want these violins to be symbols of defeat. They should be symbols of resilience and of hope.”
Ms. Pantirer told a story of the Weinstein family. “Amnon’s father, Moshe, was one of the most famous luthiers in Palestine,” she said. “He was the luthier for many members of the Palestinian orchestra. Many of them had the most beautifully made Italian and German string instruments, and he took care of them.
“But once World War II ended, Israel was born, and so was the Israel Philharmonic. Many players wanted to throw out their German-made instruments. They brought them to Moshe Weinstein and told him that they’d throw them out unless he bought them.
“He said, ‘Don’t throw them out! They’re innocent of the cruel acts of the Germans.’ So he bought them, although he knew he couldn’t resell them.
“So for 50 years, they weren’t played.”
There is a cello in that collection that will be part of the Violins of Hope. It, too, will be played at the concert in Newark.
Ms. Pantirer said that her parents had heard the Violins of Hope concert six years ago. She’s from Birmingham, Alabama, where her parents still live. “There are strong connections there between the Black and Jewish communities, and it was put on there with a Baptist church and the Jewish federation.
“There are three aspects of the concert — the past, the present, and the future,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “The past — Felix Mendelssohn’s music was banned” — he was Jewish — “and his statue in Leipzig was torn down. Now we are playing his Symphony Number 5, which quotes Psalm 46, ‘The Lord is my refuge.’
“The present — the new pieces by Paul Frucht and David Winkler.
“And the future — all our teenagers, who hopefully will be leaders. I am closing out the concert with Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. It ends with Psalm 133, how wonderful it is for brothers to live together in harmony.”
“All of this was planned before October 7, but it means even more to us now than it did then,” Ms. Pantirer said.
“The rise of antisemitism all around the world shows us that Holocaust education has to be an ongoing thing around the world,” Ms. Cha-Pyo said. “I don’t think that our students have comprehensive world history classes.” The kind of Holocaust education that Wharton Arts and Violins of Hope are providing fills in some of those gaps.
“The program is a series of connecting dots for our students and the audience,” Ms. Cha-Pyo concluded. “It won’t be something they’re learning in a book. They are hearing these stories firsthand, and now that they’ve experienced them, they have to pass them on.
“They have to be upstanders.”
Who: Wharton Arts
What: Presents Violins of Hope
When: On Sunday, January 12, at 3 p.m.
Where: At the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark
For tickets and more information: Go to whartonarts.org
AND ALSO
What: Roundtable talk about Violins of Hope
When: Saturday, January 11, at 6:30 p.m.
Where: At NJPAC
To learn more: Go to whartonarts.org
AND ALSO
What: Pre-concert talk with Avshi Weinstein
When: Before the concert on Sunday, January 12, at 1:30
Where: At NJPAC
To learn more: Go to whartonarts.org
comments