A purposefully didactic work, Stories from the Violins of Hope is part of the much greater project to ensure the facts and the victims of the Holocaust are never forgotten.

From that perspective, it does its job very well.

Kate Bookalil and Barry French in Stories from the Violins of Hope. Photo © James Klicin

Adapted to the stage by Lisa Rosenbaum and Ronda Spinak, this 90-minute play spotlights the story of the Israeli luthier Amnon Weinstein, whose singular mission to preserve instruments that belonged to Jewish musicians murdered before and during World War II has become a global music and education project.

Amnon (played here by Barry French) narrates his own life from childhood to old age, beginning with his early years in what was then the British Protectorate of Palestine, where his father, a musician-turned-violin repairer kept a collection of German violins – instruments that no Jew will play.

Word of the collection spreads and people begin to deposit other ‘survivor’ violins with the Weinsteins. One in particular haunts Amnon: a battered violin containing a residue of black ash. It belonged to a member of an Auschwitz orchestra, forced to play...