Some Jewish musicians delayed death and even survived the Holocaust by playing in orchestras at extermination camps. It was particularly true for those who were classically trained and able to read music, enabling them to perform a vast repertoire that, their captors calculated, presented a façade of normalcy.
But survival through song was less likely for even the most skilled Klezmer musicians, who played Yiddish folk music and were often self-taught, unable to read musical notation, and therefore less useful to administrators of Nazi death camps, according to Avshi Weinstein, owner and curator of the Violins of Hope collection of string instruments that survived the Holocaust even if their owners did not.
"Those were just families who had violins for music in their house," Weinstein said of typical Klezmer players, who were also specifically targeted by the Nazis for the ethnic nature of their music.
So, while the names of the collection's classical violin owners are largely known because many of them survived, Weinstein said, "We don't know the names of the owners of the Klezmer instruments."
In an event that organizers began planning five years ago, a handful of the Violins of Hope will be played at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Sunday by the teenage musicians of the New Jersey Youth Symphony to an audience that will include dozens of people who survived the Holocaust.
The event, titled "A Concert for Peace with the Violins of Hope," will include a lecture on the collection by Weinstein, a third-generation luthier based in Israel and Turkey whose late father, Amnon Weinstein, began collecting and restoring Holocaust-related instruments in the 1990's.
"It's about the history. It's also part of my history," said the son, many of whose forebears on his father's side perished in the Holocaust.
Sunday's event is sponsored by the youth symphony's parent organization, Wharton Arts, a non-denominational nonprofit based in Berkeley Heights that provides free and tuition-based performing arts education programs for children, teens and adults throughout northern New Jersey.
Sunday's concert will be attended by 51 Holocaust survivors -- most of them in their 90s -- said Helen H. Cha-Pyo, Wharton Arts' artistic director and conductor of the youth symphony.
Selections for the 3 p.m. concert, to be held in Prudential Hall, NJPAC's main venue, will include John Williams' "Theme From Shindler's List," from the score of Steven Spielberg's 1993 film based on German industrialist Oskar Schindler's rescue of 1,200 Jewish employees and their families.
A more intimate performance and presentation of the instruments will take place Saturday evening at the Chabad of Short Hills Center for Jewish Life in Millburn Township
While the weekend program is titled "Concert for Peace," Cha-Pyo said it's unrelated to the war in Gaza, which began with an attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed some 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and since then has claimed the lives of an additional 500 Israelis and more than 46,000 Palestinians, according to the United Nations.
Rather, Cha-Pyo said planning for the program began in 2020, though it was postponed by the coronavirus pandemic and then revived early in 2023, before the war broke out.
"This all happened before Oct. 7," Cha-Pyo said.
The collection's 100 or so instruments include the Zimermann-Krongold violin, about which a good deal is known.
Shimon Krongold, a Polish industrialist and amateur violinist, commissioned young Warsaw luthier Yaacov Zimermann to make the violin in 1924, according to a history compiled by Violins of Hope.
Zimmerman decorated it with a subtle Star of David inlaid on the back and a message inside: "I made this violin for my loyal friend Shimon Krongold," which he signed and dated. Whatever type of music Krongold actually played, Weinstein said the Jewish star was characteristic of Klezmer violins, sometimes called fiddles -- think "Fiddler on the Roof" -- versus unadorned models typically played by classical musicians.
Kronghold fled Warsaw with the violin when World War II broke out in 1939, eventually making his way to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he died from typhus near the end of the war. Later, someone took the violin and news of Krongold's death to his family in Jerusalem, and they eventually donated it to the Violins of Hope collection.
An educational component of Wharton Arts' Violins of Hope program included a talk last year by a Holocaust survivor attended by members of the youth symphony.
"It's important for me in the symphonic world, especially when the music is without words, that there is context in which they understand why I had programmed these pieces," Cha-Pyo said.
For Sunday's concert, the Zimermann-Krongold violin has been assigned to Joel Marin, 17, of Piscataway, who plays first violin for the youth symphony. Apart from the normal passion Marin puts into all of his playing, the teen said he was stirred by the violin's history, which in turn was amplified by the century-old instrument's warm lower tones and penetrating highs.
"I really love the sound of it. It's rich, resonant," said Marin, a Seventh-Day Adventist. "It reminds me of how much people suffered in the Holocaust, how much it cost them because they thought differently than what the Nazis thought. And it was not just Jews that died. Catholics died, Seventh Day Adventists died, Protestants that helped Jews escape, they also perished."
Marin put the violin's chromatic range on display this week at the youth symphony's rehearsal space in New Providence with an impromptu solo performance of the Shindler's List theme, with its lilting melody repeated in successively higher octaves.
For Cha-Pyo, Marin's sensitive rendering of the theme based not only on technique and rehearsal but also an understanding of its context was precisely the kind of synthesis that she and the youth symphony hope their young players achieve.
"Art for art's sake is not enough for young people," Cha-Pyo said. "Our mission, my personal mission as a music educator, is to connect music to life."