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Restoring Hope Story of violin repair artists gives new life to Holocaust musicians COURTESY OF THE BRAID
Seven actors will bring to life the extraordinary story of violins played in ghettos, forests and concentration camps and the Israeli violin maker determined to restore them. By Bridgette M. Redman Violins are said to mimic the human voice and sometimes the stories they tell echo through generations. Such is the case with more than 80 violins, violas and cellos that have been refurbished after surviving the Holocaust. Each has its own story to tell of musicians who did and didn’t make it out alive. The Braid, formerly known as the Jewish Women’s Theatre, will be telling these stories on Jan. 31 during a Zoom session. The premiere of “Stories from the Violins of Hope” tells the true stories of instruments rescued from such places as concentration camps, forest hideouts and Jewish ghettos that made their way to Israel to be restored by Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein, father and son luthiers who live in Tel Aviv. The Violins of Hope is a project of the Weinsteins, who collect the violins and their stories and lovingly repair the instruments. These violins, in nonpandemic times, travel the world and are played by symphonies, keeping the voices of Holocaust victims alive. The violins came to Los
Angeles in early 2020, and the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony partnered with The Braid and Temple Isaiah to create a theatrical telling of the stories, but the scheduled performances were canceled because of COVID-19. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to collaborate,” said Noreen Green, founder and maestra of the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony. “Ronda Spinak, artistic director of The Braid, had this idea about creating an original script that would tell the stories of the Violins of Hope.” The violins offer hope among horror because they literally and metaphorically offer restoration, and they have a unique way of giving life to their previous owners. “The violin is the closest thing to the human voice,” Green said. “You hold it under your chin and it is right next to your heart. The violin’s wood vibrates with your body when you pull the string. The instrument becomes part of your body. So here are these instruments that were a part of someone else’s body. Playing them and making them come alive, it brings the Holocaust
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story alive again.” The job of writing the script was given to Lisa Rosenbaum, a playwright and novelist who is part of The Braid. Rosenbaum said she originally knew nothing about the violins so she began to research, looking at the violins, reading collections of stories and then, finally, talking to Amnon Weinstein. “It wasn’t until I spoke to Amnon that I began to realize that he is the story — it’s a story of a family, actually, three generations of luthiers,” Rosenbaum said. In the 1930s, Amnon’s father, Moshe, came to what was then Palestine from Lithuania, where he had been a violinist and luthier. At the time, there were Jewish musicians from all over Europe who were fleeing the Nazis. They didn’t want to play the German instruments anymore, so they gave them to Weinstein, telling him to take them or they’d burn them. He hid them away. Years later, his son, Amnon, would end up with these instruments. “When you think of the enormity of the talent that was lost in the Holocaust — these violins were their violins, they were in the camps, forests and
ghettos, played in concerts or under duress,” Rosenbaum said. “But now they are able to be played again — what an extraordinary hopeful idea.” Rosenbaum focused the story on the three generations of Weinsteins, along with selected stories of the violins themselves. “I read through a number of them and they all move you,” she said. “Everyone has a story, but there were several that I could just see how they would lend themselves to drama. There is a story of a railroad worker who picks up a violin that is thrown from a train by a Jew on his way to the camps. He says, ‘I can’t use this anymore, take my violin.’ This railroad worker keeps it and how it ends up with Amnon is a story.” One violinist angrily confronted a group of Nazis and kept them from killing him by playing his violin. Another belonged to a 12-year-old boy who was a partisan in the forest. “It literally took him into a town where Nazis had commandeered a restaurant and used it as their base,” Rosenbaum said. “He did some pretty brave
things and what happened to him and his violin, which survived the war and made it to Amnon, is an extraordinary story. It brings tears to your eyes that this violin will eventually be played by a 22-year-old man in a concert.” Portraying Amnon Weinstein is Robert Trebor, an actor with more than 47 years’ experience playing a wide range of characters both real and fiction. “He’s an extraordinary man,” Trebor said. “Of all the characters I’ve played, he is the healthiest. He is a genuinely healthy, decent man who is an incredible luthier, making and repairing string instruments. He grew up in Israel, which was then Palestine, and there was a news blackout of what was happening in Germany as he was growing up. He had no idea about the concentration camps or Nazi slaughter. When the world war ended, word trickled out as to what happened.” Weinstein lost nearly 400 members of his family to the Holocaust. The story tells how, at first, he did not want to have anything to do with the Holocaust, but these violins continued to call to him. “Every performance is a