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Last week I received a story submission from a surprising source: Habitat for Humanity of Clallam County.

“Recently someone donated a Bielski Violin that was dated back to the Holocaust and has the star of David on it,” wrote Jessica Dietzman, the communications and administrative coordinator.

The “Bielski violin,” before it was restored. Courtesy Allan Ross.

Attached was a story about the treasures the nonprofit home-building organization has come across, including this rare violin unearthed by their e-commerce specialist, Richard Turner.

Among the many items he has handled, one stands above the rest. Shortly after joining the e‐commerce team, Rich noticed a case sitting at the bottom of a rack. Weeks later, he opened it and discovered a violin unlike any he had seen. The back featured a pearl Star of David. His research revealed it was a Beilski [sic] violin, crafted in 1881 and released for production in 1895.
From there, the story deepened. Rich learned that only 33 Beilski violins made it into the Holocaust and just 11 survived. Habitat had one of them. “It was surreal to hold that violin knowing the story and history it has,” he said. “Mixed emotions.”

Did a Holocaust-era violin associated with the Bielski partisans actually end up in Port Angeles, Washington, and how?

To get the violin into the proper hands, Turner reached out to Allan Ross, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Quad Cities…Iowa.

“We’re about the third smallest Federation,” Ross told me over Zoom when I reached out to him. “We have maybe 400 Jews left in the community. Kids don’t usually come back, and our seniors, they’re snowbirds for a while and then they stay.”

Turner apparently found Ross while trying to connect with Violins of Hope, a Tel Aviv-based nonprofit run by father and son duo Amnon and Avshalom (Avshi) Weinstein, that works to preserve and restore stringed instruments rescued from the ashes of World War II. Earlier this year, Violins of Hope took up residency in Iowa for two months.

Ross says Turner contacted him not knowing what to do with the violin.

“We don’t know where it came from, what to do with it, but it’s got a Jewish star on the back, so I said, ‘mail it to me,’” Ross says. “It was in pretty rough shape.”

Ross brought the violin, which has an inlaid mother of pearl Star of David, to a luthier in Davenport to fix it up. The luthier determined that the violin likely originated in either Markneukirchen, Germany or Schoenbach, Czechoslovakia (now Luby, Czech Republic) in the last quarter of the 19th century.

The violin post-restoration. Courtesy Allan Ross.

“Both of these towns were part of the Musikwinkel, Music Angle, known for their music instrument making on both sides of the Bohemia and Saxony border,” the luthier wrote. “Trade between the two makes it difficult to distinguish the exact source.”

Not all 19th century violins are priceless artifacts, though. Violin makers in this region during that time were creating and selling inexpensive instruments overseas, where companies like Sears, Roebuck & Co. advertised them in their catalogs. Think of it as an early 20th-century version of an Amazon violin.

Even an inlaid mother of pearl Star of David doesn’t necessarily indicate Jewish origin. According to a 2021 article in Moment Magazine titled “The Stars of David that Aren’t,” such violins were advertised as one of several designs from which to choose, and they were described as “six-pointed stars.” It wasn’t until after the First Zionist Congress in 1897 that the Star of David gained significance as a primary symbol of Judaism. Until then, it was the menorah. It’s possible that 150 years later, with the profound losses of the Holocaust looming large in the Jewish and popular imagination, that a German violin with a six-pointed star could be retrofitted with a new identity — and even sold to an unwitting buyer as a salvaged artifact from the ghettos of Europe.

Ross says the Port Angeles violin was probably not a catalogue model, since it has no label or indication of the brand. However, according to Weinstein, it’s not a “Bielski.”

The Bielski violins are named so by the Weinsteins themselves in honor of the partisan brothers, because Amnon’s wife, Assaela, is the daughter of Asael Bielski. The Weinsteins named a selection of rescued violins with the same mother of pearl stars as “Bielski,” though their origins track with the Port Angeles violin and may also have little value. It’s probable that Turner, with Habitat for Humanity, made the Bielski connection after noticing the design resemblance on the Violins of Hope website and assumed the decaying instrument in his donation pile had relational significance.

The Weinsteins turned down the violin, likely due to its untraceable origin. Ross was happy to adopt it and find it a forever home. The mysterious Habitat for Humanity of Clallam County violin was played for the first time in who knows how many years this spring in Iowa, and it is currently being processed at the Putnam Museum in Davenport.

Holocaust Center for Humanity CEO Ilana Cone Kennedy and Music of Remembrance founder and artistic director Mina Miller have no additional information about the history of local klezmer instruments, leaving the Port Angeles violin a mystery here, too. Miller brought Violins of Hope to Seattle in March of 2020, where a local resident came forward with a similar instrument and the question of whether it had survived the Holocaust. The Weinsteins chose not to accept that violin, either.

Music of Remembrance musicians in Seattle in 2020 performing with Violins of Hope instruments. Photo by Ben Van Houten.

MOR Board Chair David Epstein, Honorary Counsel General of Germany Uli Fischer, and a woman with a violin of unknown origin in Seattle in 2020. Photo by Ben Van Houten.

Meaningful klezmer violins salvaged from World War II do exist. They arrive to the Weinsteins with a family story about their survival through Europe’s darkest moments. Many stories, and many instruments, have certainly been lost. And some stories are not stories at all, but rather imagined legends of survival transposed on a cheap, popular item. How a 19th century European violin arrived at a Habitat for Humanity on the Pacific Ocean may never be known.

“That would be fascinating, if someone came forward and said, ‘Hey this belonged to my grandfather’,” Ross says. “That would be a great story.”

The Song of the Lost Violin

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