In the late 1980s, a customer entered the shop of Amnon Weinstein, a young Tel Aviv violin maker, asking for his old instrument to be restored. When Weinstein opened the case, he found ashes coating the bow: The customer had survived Auschwitz because the Germans had assigned him to the death camp orchestra that played as prisoners were herded from cattle cars to gas chambers. The man hadn’t played it since.

Weinstein was thunderstruck. Hundreds of his own relatives — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — had died in the Holocaust. To handle one of those instruments was too much. “I could not. I could not,” he says.

Finally, he did . . . and then began restoring other violins that survived:

• One carried out of Dachau when its owner was liberated.

• Another thrown from a death train by a French musician crying out, “Where I’m headed, I won’t need this.”

• The Brender instrument that traveled with a Romanian prodigy through a hard labor camp and then into the forest, where he fought with Jewish partisans.
• Several belonged to musicians who smuggled them out of Germany when they escaped and ultimately played them in the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.

Over the past two decades, dozens of these extraordinary instruments that embody the harshest moments in Jewish history have been refurbished, restrung and brought back to life by Amnon and his son Avshalom. They tell a tale of torment and endurance, of the power of music and the importance of memory. They are our Jewish story.