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Today's Family Magazine

Violins of Hope education concerts teach lessons of the Holocaust

Feb 14, 2017 11:39AM ● By Today's Family
Following the success of the 2015 Violins of Hope Education Concerts performed by The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall for nearly 10,000 students, thousands more will enjoy encore presentations of the Violins of Hope Education Concert March 8-10, performed this time at the Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at the Temple-Tifereth Israel on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.

One performance will be open to the public: Wednesday, March 8 at noon. Tickets are $15 and can be purchased now by visiting https://case.edu/maltzcenter/calendar or by calling the Maltz Performing Arts Center box office at 216-368-6062.

These concerts are based on the original December 2015 Violins of Hope Education Concerts, a collaboration between The Cleveland Orchestra and the Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Play House Master of Fine Arts Program in Acting. In these Cleveland Orchestra Education Concerts, music and drama were combined to express the themes of spirit, resistance, resilience, and hope. This special program created a powerful lens through which the audience was able to view the important role of music in Jewish life, before, during, and after the Holocaust.

Conducted by The Cleveland Orchestra’s Associate Conductor, Brett Mitchell, the March 2017 concerts will feature Cleveland Orchestra First Associate Concertmaster Peter Otto and Assistant Principal Cellist Charles Bernard. The program includes Bloch’s Simchas Torah [Rejoicing] from Baal Shem; Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, Opus 47; Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, Opus 34; and John Williams’s Three Pieces from Schindler's List for Violin and Orchestra.

About Violins of Hope Cleveland
Violins of Hope Cleveland was a community-wide collaboration that aimed to inform, educate, and inspire people throughout the Midwest. The instruments played survived the Holocaust and were collected and restored by Israeli violin maker Amnon Weinstein for more than two decades. The historic violins provided a rare opportunity to explore the unique stories behind each instrument and the individuals who owned them. Throughout the fall of 2015, a diverse range of arts and education organizations came together in one of Northeast Ohio’s largest collaborations to present performances, lectures, an exhibition, and other public programming. The partners were: The Cleveland Orchestra, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, Facing History and Ourselves, ideastream®, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage.