JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Read this article in Yiddish. Prairie Sonata Sandy Shefrin Rabin FriesenPress, 2020, 288 pp. Yiddish culture always had better luck in Canada than in the United States. Partly this was because Jewish immigrants to Canada were more cohesive and better organized, and Canadian society in general displayed greater respect for cultural diversity. As a result,…
She was never quite as famous as the men: Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Jascha Heifetz. But if you heard Ida Haendel play violin once, you knew her tone anywhere: the shuddery, overwhelming pointedness she gave to any piece of music. Her music was beautiful, and unsparing. If you didn’t want to weep, you were better…
(JTA) — The quirky Jewish physicist would have been proud. A violin once owned by Albert Einstein sold for $516,500 at the New York-based Bonhams auction house on Friday. The instrument, which eportedly was gifted to the scientist in 1933 by Oscar Steger, a member of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, went for over three times…
On August 31, the superstar Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman turns 70, and amid the mazel tovs, music lovers might wonder who will take over his prominent role in musical life when he is ready to retire. Fiddling is a demanding profession, rarely pursued at its highest levels by septuagenarians. Even the Olympian Jascha Heifetz scaled…
Joseph Feingold first laid eyes on the violin at a flea market outside of Frankfurt. The year was 1947, and the 23-year-old Holocaust survivor, who was living in a displaced persons camp, traded a carton of American cigarettes for the instrument. As the young man picked up the bow for the first time since his…
In Raanana, Israel, Eugene Drucker’s brown eyes welled with tears as he finished a rendition of Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, which his father began 80 years prior in Germany, only to be cut short by anti-Semitic Nazi policy. Accompanied by the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra, the 63-year-old, says his father, Ernest Drucker,…
Amnon Weinstein has devoted his life to researching and collecting Holocaust-era violins. (Reuters) — A violin thrown some seventy years ago from a train transporting French Jews to the Nazi Auschwitz death camp will sound in the concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic on Tuesday night, along with other instruments once played by victims of…
(JTA) — With all the recent news in Germany about the search for heirs to art taken during the Nazi era, a recent announcement about a 300-year-old violin caught my eye. A Nuremberg-based foundation for music students was hoping to find descendants of Felix Hildesheimer of Speyer — a musical instrument dealer who bought the…
Virtual
Dec 7, 2022
7 pm ET ·
A conversation with Julia Haart and her son Shlomo, stars of Netflix's 'My Unorthodox Life,' about the new season and much more.
