Amnon Weinstein, who restored violins from the Holocaust, dies at 84

Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tribute to those silenced in the Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.

His death in a hospital was confirmed by his son Avshalom Weinstein.

Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of hope, an organization that provides violins he has restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of cities around the world, including Berlin, at an event celebrating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound represents a boy, a girl and men and women who will never speak again. But the violins, when played, will speak for them.”

There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.

Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps and then had to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was thrown from a train to a railroad worker by a man who knew his fate.

“I don’t need a violin where I’m going now,” the man told the worker, using Mr. Weinstein’s phrase. “Here, take my violin, so it may live.”

The son of a violin repairman, Mr. Weinstein worked in a cramped and dusty workshop in the basement of an apartment building on King Solomon Street in Tel Aviv.

“Walking in there was like stepping back in time,” said James A. Grymes, a music professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. wrote a book about Violins of Hope, said in an interview. “It really felt like you were in Stradivarius’ workshop: the smell of varnish, parts of violins everywhere. It’s like he was the Willy Wonka of the violin.”

One afternoon in the 1980s, a man with a tattoo identifying a prisoner on his arm arrived with a beaten-up violin who, like him, had survived Auschwitz.

“The top of the violin is damaged from being played in the rain and snow,” Mr. Grymes wrote in “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust – Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour” (2014). “When Amnon took the instrument apart, he discovered that it contained ash that he could only assume came from the crematoria of Auschwitz.”

Mr. Weinstein, who had lost hundreds of his extended family in the Holocaust, almost sent the man away; working on such an instrument seemed too emotionally charged. But eventually he repaired the violin, and the man gave it to his grandson to play.

Mr. Weinstein didn’t think much about working on Holocaust-era violins until the late 1990s, when he trained his son to be a luthier. The experience made him reflect on the role of violins in Jewish culture, from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to klezmer bands and the flying concerts of Itzhak Perlman.

“It was kind of a must for the young generation to learn to play the violin,” he said in the PBS documentary. “And if you have a violin, Friday or Saturday night, there was always someone who took it and played it.”

During a radio interview, he asked listeners to bring him instruments related to the Holocaust. Soon families began appearing in his workshop with violins stored in attics and cellars, each with its own haunting story.

Mr. Weinstein was particularly shocked by those recovered from concentration camps after the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945.

“This was the last human sound that all those people heard: the violin,” he said on the radio in 2016 interview at WKSU in Ohio. “You cannot use the name beauty. But this was the beauty of this time, these 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 repairman. His mother, Golda (Yevirovitz) Weinstein, was a pianist and secretary in her husband’s workshop. They had emigrated from Lithuania in 1938, just as the persecution of Jews in Germany was escalating.

Mr. Weinstein grew up as a helper in his father’s violin shop. In his early twenties, he moved to Cremona, Italy – a city long known for its master luthiers – to study violin making. He continued his training in Paris under Étienne Vatelot, one of the world’s most renowned luthiers. In 1975, he married Assaela Bielski Gershoni, whose father was a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II, made famous in the 2008 film “Defiance.”

After his father’s death in 1986, Mr. Weinstein took over the family violin shop; ten years later he founded Violins of Hope. The first concerts with the violins from the collection took place in Turkey and Israel in 2008. Others followed in Switzerland, Spain and Mexico, as well as in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.

“Every concert is a victory,” he often said.

Musicians, especially Jewish ones, have described playing violins from the collection as a moving experience.

“It’s emotional for me because I’m not there to play this violin, I’m there to make it speak,” Niv Ashkenazia violinist who is a album with an instrument from the collection, said in an interview. “Our job as musicians is to just let these violins shine through.”

In addition to his son Avshalom, who plans to continue the Violins of Hope project, Mr. Weinstein is survived by his wife; two other children, Merav Vonshak and Yehonatan Weinstein; and seven grandchildren.

In 2016, Mr. Weinstein received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germanyone of the country’s highest honors.

During the awards ceremony, then German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke directly to Mr. Weinstein.

“Behind each of your priceless violins lies a human soul,” he said. “A human being persecuted, tormented and silenced by unimaginable violence and cruelty.”

Mr. Steinmeier told about the man who threw his violin out of the train. He described a prisoner who played the violin in Auschwitz.

“Each violin represents a person, Amnon,” he said. “And when you play violins, they represent six million people.”