Diedra Lukoff went to the Hilbert Art Museum in Orange last week for lack of any other plans on a sweltering afternoon.
She expected a good time, a respite from the heat amid the gallery’s cheerful contemporary Californian art.
The museum’s permanent collection is jovial — a portrait of an In-N-Out-style cheeseburger welcomes visitors to the main entrance. Behind the burger, bright watercolors and vivid landscapes of the California Scene Painting movement, as well as uplifting and familiar Disney animation art, adorn the hallways.
To her surprise, Lukoff left the museum in tears, moved by a sorrowful temporary exhibition on display through the end of the month — the Violins of Hope.
“I asked my husband to figure out something to do today, and we encountered this,” she said, next to 20 violins owned by Jewish musicians before and during the Holocaust.
“I had no idea it was here,” she added.
Lukoff’s family is of Romanian and Polish Jewish descent.
The exhibition struck a chord.
“I cried,” she said. “That’s it. There’s nothing more to say.”
The Violins of Hope project began serendipitously in 1979 when a man took his instrument to Israeli luthier Amnon Weinstein for repair.
The man told Weinstein the violin had been given to him by his employer, an Auschwitz survivor who had used it to serenade inmates as they were marched to their deaths in the camp’s gas chambers.
When Weinstein opened the body of the violin in his workshop, he discovered a blackish powder inside. He suspected the residue was ash from the Auschwitz crematorium, where the violin had last been played.
Motivated by that harrowing encounter, Weinstein and his son, Avshalom, began systematically collecting and repairing stringed instruments connected to the Holocaust. Although Amnon died in 2024, his son continues to serve as a guardian of the collection.
Today, the Weinstein collection comprises nearly 100 instruments that tour the world.
Some have been restored to playing condition. Others are left in disrepair as a reminder of their disturbing histories.
One on display at the Hilbert Museum, dubbed the “Heil Hitler” violin, was owned by a German Jewish musician who needed a minor repair job done in 1936. Before he repaired it, the craftsman opened the violin for no apparent reason and inscribed on its upper deck “Heil Hitler, 1936,” adding a swastika. He later closed the violin and handed it back to the owner, who played on it for years, unaware of the inscription.
Although the Weinsteins accepted the instrument into their collection, they vowed never to restore that violin and declared that it would never be played again.
Others, such as a circa 1850 Schweitzer violin used by an Auschwitz inmate in the camp’s men’s orchestra, could be among the instruments selected for play in the coming weeks at performances across Orange County.
Tommy Phillips, president of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, worked nearly four years to bring the Violins of Hope to Orange County.
“They are a testament to survival, and so important to display, especially now,” he said, the day after two Israeli Embassy employees were shot and killed in Washington, D.C.
In addition to the 20 violins and one viola at the Hilbert Museum, Phillips has arranged for about 40 more Holocaust-era violins to be displayed and performed with in Orange County through June 10, when the collection heads back to Israel.
A full schedule of events is available to view at philharmonicsociety.org/voh-scheduleofevents.
On June 10, the 60-plus instruments will be all together for an event at University Synagogue in Irvine. The evening will also feature an ensemble performance by Pacific Symphony Concertmaster Dennis Kim, string players of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, violinist Niv Ashkenazi and pianist Jason Stroll.
“Each of these violins tells a unique story of hope and survival,” Phillips said. “The goal of the collection is not to erase the pain, but to keep the memory of what happened alive.”
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