Amnon Weinstein, the Israeli violin maker who restored violins belonging to Jews in the course of the Holocaust in order that musicians world wide could play them in a hopeful, melodic tribute to those silenced in Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84 years old.
His son (*84*) Weinstein announced his death within the hospital.
Mr. Weinstein was the founder Violin of Hope, a corporation that gives violins he restored to orchestras for concert events and academic programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments were played in dozens of cities world wide, including Berlin, during ceremonies marking the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“The Violin of Hope is like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound represents a boy, a girl, a man and a woman who will never speak again. But the violin, when played, will speak for them.”
His collection includes over 60 violins from the Holocaust.
Some belonged to Jews, who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps and were then forced to play in bands because the prisoners were marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was thrown from a train onto a railwayman by a person who knew his fate.
“The place I go to now, I don’t need a violin,” the person told the worker, Weinstein said. “Here, take my violin and make it come to life.”
The son of a violin mechanic, Weinstein worked in a cramped and dusty workshop within the basement of an apartment constructing on King Solomon Street in Tel Aviv.
“Walking there was like stepping back in time” – James A. Grymes, professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who wrote a book about Violins of Hope – he said in an interview. “It really felt like I was in a Stradivarius workshop – the smell of varnish, there were pieces of violins everywhere. It was like he was the Willy Wonka of the violin.”
One afternoon within the Eighties, a person arrived with a tattoo on his arm identifying a prisoner with a battered violin who, like him, had survived Auschwitz.
“The top of the violin was damaged from playing in rain and snow,” Mr. Grymes wrote in his book “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust — Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Humanity’s Darkest Hour” (2014). “When Amnon dismantled the instrument, he discovered ash inside, which he could only assume was the remains of fallout from the Auschwitz crematoria.”
Mr. Weinstein, who lost a whole bunch of members of his clan within the Holocaust, all but rejected the person; working on such an instrument seemed too emotional. Eventually, nevertheless, he repaired the violin, and the person gave it to his grandson to play.
Mr. Weinstein didn’t think much about working on Holocaust-era violins again until the late Nineteen Nineties, when he was training his son to be a luthier. This experience led him to reflect on the role of the violin in Jewish culture, from Eastern European shtetls, through klezmer bands, to Itzak Perlman’s soaring concertos.
“Learning to play the violin was a necessity for the younger generation,” he said within the PBS documentary. “And when you had a violin, on a Friday or Saturday night, someone would always pick it up and play it.”
In a radio interview, he asked listeners to bring him instruments related to the Holocaust. Soon families started to appear in his workshop with violins stored in attics and basements, each with its own memorable story.
Mr. Weinstein was particularly shocked by those rescued from concentration camps after the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945.
“That was the last human sound that all these people heard – the violin,” he said in a 2016 radio interview interview at WKSU in Ohio. – You cannot use the name “beauty.” But that was the great thing about those times, those violins.”
Amnon Weinstein was born on July 21, 1939 in Mandatory Palestine and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father, Moshe Weinstein, was a musician and violin mechanic. His mother, Golda (Yevirovitz) Weinstein, was a pianist and secretary in her husband’s workshop. They emigrated from Lithuania in 1938, when persecution of Jews was intensifying in Germany.
Mr. Weinstein grew up helping in his father’s violin shop. In his early twenties, he moved to Cremona, Italy – a city long known for its master violin makers – to review violin making. He continued his studies in Paris under Étienne Vatelot, probably the most outstanding violin makers on the earth. In 1975, he married Assaela Bielski Gershoni, whose father was a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II and who became famous for the 2008 film “Defiance.”
After his father died in 1986, Mr. Weinstein took over the family violin shop; a decade later he founded Violins of Hope. The first concert events with violins from the gathering took place in Turkey and Israel in 2008. Subsequent concert events took place in Switzerland, Spain and Mexico, in addition to in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.
“Every concert is a victory,” he often said.
Musicians, especially Jewish ones, describe playing the violins from the gathering as a moving experience.
“It’s emotional for me because I’m not there to play that violin, I’m there to let them speak.” Niv Ashkenaziviolinist who recorded album presents an instrument from the gathering – he said in an interview. “Our job as musicians is to just let those violins shine.”
In addition to his son (*84*), who plans to proceed the Violins of Hope project, Mr. Weinstein is survived by his wife; two other children, Merav Vonshak and Yehonatan Weinstein; and 7 grandchildren.
In 2016, Weinstein received the award Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germanyone among the best honors within the country.
During the awards ceremony, then-German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke on to Weinstein.
“Behind each of your priceless violins there is a human soul,” he said. “A man persecuted, tormented, silenced by unimaginable violence and cruelty.”
Mr. Steinmeier talked concerning the man who threw the violin from the train. He described a prisoner playing the violin in Auschwitz.
“Each violin represents a person, Amnon,” he said. “And when your violins play, they represent six million people.”
