By Jean Hayes
A crowd of community partners, sponsors, state and local officials and special guests gathered at a special reception Oct. 5 on the Carnegie Mellon University campus to celebrate the opening of Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh, a community project centered on the lessons of diversity, equity and inclusion. The exhibit is being housed in the Posner Center on the CMU campus and was curated by CMU Libraries’ Sam Lemley, curator of special collections, and Heidi Wiren Kebe, associate director of creative.
Andreas Michaelis, the German ambassador to the U.S., shared the story of a Berlin violin maker in the 1930s who secretly defaced the violin of a German Jew by engraving a swastika on the inside. The violin was later given to Israeli luthier and violin maker Amnon Weinstein who shared the story with Michaelis in Weinstein’s shop in Tel Aviv, Israel. “This violin of treachery was never assembled again once its hidden message had been discovered. The voice of this violin must be forever silenced,” Michaelis shared. “It is our duty never to forget the past. We must learn our lessons and shape the future. We must not let hatred win.”
Violins of Hope is a collection of over 100 restored violins that were played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust and restored by Weinstein and his son, Avshalom (Avshi). The Weinsteins have spent 25 years locating and restoring these violins as a tribute to those killed in the Holocaust, including 400 of their own relatives. The project has been traveling around the world since 2016.
“There can be no question about it: Amnon’s and Avshi’s Violins of Hope play an essential role in this. They teach us about the past and are constant reminders of it,” Michaelis said.
Other speakers at the event included Farnam Jahanian, Carnegie Mellon president; Sandy Rosen, chair of Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh and co-chair Pat Siger; and Jake Pawlak, deputy mayor for the City of Pittsburgh and director for the Office of Management and Budget.
View the complete article on the Carnegie Mellon University News website.