Documentary offers hope after Pittsburgh attack
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. >> The screening of a documentary Monday on the restoration of violins once owned and played by Jewish people in 1930s and 40s Germany, took on a special significance in the wake of the Oct. 27 mass shooting in Pittsburgh.
Rabbi Yossi Rubin of Clifton Park Chabad had scheduled the screening of the film, “Violins of Hope: The Cleveland Concert”, weeks ago as part of the organization’s annual remembrance of Kristallnacht, the night marking the start of the Nazi program to eradicate Jewish people and their culture from the country.
With the recent mass killing of 11 Jewish congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Rubin transformed an event to remember ugly times in the past, into one that offered hope in times of darkness.
The Nov. 5 event, re-titled Solidarity Gathering For Pittsburgh, drew around 60 people to the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library.
“The inner heart and soul of our country is good,” Rubin said. “Everywhere I went after the attack people said we’re with you, Rabbi. Moral character is seen not with the attack but how we react and respond to it and the same can be said for the country as a whole. We can see what the inner heart and soul of the country is by how people react and respond.”
Rubin added that since the killings in Pittsburgh millions of people in the country are clearly horrified by the attack.
“Though there are negative things from the attack, inner good will flourish and spread,” he said.
That was never clearer than from the documentary that followed. “Violins of Hope” documents
the efforts of Amnon Weinstein and his son Avshalom to restore violins once owned by Jewish people who lived in Germany through the Holocaust, and the 2015 concert in Cleveland, Ohio where they were played in an orchestral setting.
It is a film that illustrates how the human spirit is expressed, in this case through music, and how, despite depraved, unrestrained, efforts to destroy that spirit, it survives to flourish.
Starting with stark black and white photographs from 1930s Nazi Germany, the film describes the long affinity and affection Jewish people had to the violin and the care and love given the instruments to bring the voices of their former owners back to life.
Text statements from Holocaust survivors shown at the start of the film set the tone in precise language. “They played for their neighbors. They played for their lives”.
Amnon Weinstein explained that the collection began with his father who bought every violin made in Germany for the war years that he was offered. Though he meant to restore them he never did. His son found them and is in the process of restoring them and adding more.
The film is a mix of voices, Weinstein’s, those of Holocaust survivors, professional musicians, and those musicians who played them at the 2015 concert. It is narrated by actor Adrien Brody.
“Many of the violins were in very bad condition,” Weinstein said. “They were stored away in attics. People didn’t want to remember.”
These were not the best instruments on the market at the time. These were the instruments of everyday Jewish people. They played klezmer music along with popular tunes, numbers from famous composers, at weddings, funerals, or on the street corners.
“For centuries violins were treasured,” Weinstein said. “They were highly prized. They are linked to the Jewish soul. It can imitate a prayer or a birth.”
As a way of describing the type of musician who once played the instruments he’s restoring, Weinstein offered a humorous story from the time.
“You’d ask a klezmer musician if he could read music and he’d answer, can a bird read music,” Weinstein said.
The film offered stories of stones being thrown at Jewish orchestra members when they rehearsed or played a performance, a man handing his violin to a railway worker from the slats of a cattle car as it made its way along the tracks to a concentration camp, and one man who’s musical ability saved his life.
“I saw the kapo (a prisoner functionary in Nazi concentration camps) coming toward me and I knew I was going to die,” said one Holocaust survivor. “He came to me and somehow, without any thought, my two hands starting playing the Blue Danube Waltz on the violin. I saw the kapo start to move his fingers in time to the music and I kept playing. Eventually, he pointed to me and turned to the others, ‘He lives, he said’.”
Another story centered on a man who survived the war along with his violin. All his life said he’s still living relation, he referred to it as “my friend”. He held on to it when he could no longer play, rubbing it and keeping it close to him. While playing it on street corners in one of the Nazi ghettos the money and scraps of food he had received saved the lives of 18 people.
The message of the violins, said one of those interviewed, is that no matter how hard the Nazis tried they couldn’t destroy the culture.
“Violins of Hope is a monument of hope to all those people who cannot speak,” Weinstein said. “They tell us that we are not prisoners of hope, that we can reach hope over despair.”