From World-Famous Violinist to Baal Teshuva: The Story of Mírel Reznic and the Auschwitz Violin

One of the most famous Jewish violinists in the world, Mirel Reznic, a world-renowned virtuoso, became religious and since then he hasn't left the Talmud, halachic study, and prayer. “You always have to add more and be consistent,” he says.

Reznic is a Jew with a big heart. He speaks simply, without airs, and with a lot of humor. To give some perspective – millions of people around the world know the violinist who appears with a kippah on his head and is ranked among the ten best violinists in the world. The honor and success were not enough for Reznic. He felt there was something beyond that, that he had to touch the spiritual dimension, because otherwise, as he says – what are these lives worth?

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date on which the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated by the Red Army, is a symbolic day for Reznic, as he plays a violin that once belonged to a Jewish man who played it in that very death camp.

“At Auschwitz there was an orchestra in which Jews played,” Reznic relates. “The musicians, relatively speaking, had better lives compared to the other Jews who were doing back-breaking labor. That Jewish violinist, whose violin is now in my hands on loan, once played an entire day in honor of one of the officers’ birthdays. In that situation the Nazis got drunk, including the commander. Toward midnight, the commander ordered his deputy to shoot the Jew. He refused, so the camp commander pulled out a rifle and shot him himself. The violinist was killed on the spot and his violin shattered into pieces.

“For some unknown reason, one of the soldiers gathered the splinters of the violin and placed them inside a newspaper. Another Jew in the camp, who knew the violinist, paid him money for the fragments. Years later the violin was smuggled to Jerusalem, assembled, and restored. Somehow it ended up in my hands. When I received it – I trembled. I felt the soul of that Jew in the violin. Every night I slept with it and cried. In the past, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I was invited to perform, and it was as if the violin played by itself.

“The violin is with me until the Third Temple is built, until the resurrection of the dead.”

Childhood in Romania

Reznic, a resident of Ramat Gan and father of three sons (36, 33, and 12), was born in the city of Arad in the Transylvania region of Romania and began violin lessons at the age of five.

In 1975, he completed his violin studies with distinction at the Academy of Music in Cluj, took part in many competitions, and won prizes – among them first prize in the national George Enescu competition for young musicians in Bucharest.

In 1976, he immigrated to Israel with his sister, pianist Miriam Reznic-Wolf, and from then on he engaged in composition, arrangement, and playing in a variety of musical styles: Gypsy music, Mediterranean, Latin and Balkan, pop, country, jazz, and big band. Over the years, Reznic became a prominent instrumental representative of Jewish music and klezmer melodies around the world.

As mentioned, Reznic was ranked in the list of the top ten violinists in the world by Columbia Records (the oldest brand in the field of sound recordings, whose beginnings are in 1888 in the United States).

Reznic's father, a cardiac surgeon by profession, dreamed that his son too would heal broken hearts with a surgeon’s knife. The son also wanted to heal hearts – but in a slightly different way.

When he was 20, he was orphaned of both parents and immigrated to Israel with his sister, of blessed memory.

“In a certain sense, all my life I was a kind of lone wolf,” he recalls. “In Romania we were a very wealthy, bourgeois family. When we came to Israel, the contents of the house remained with the Communists. To give you an idea – today it would be considered property worth about half a billion euros, while Miriam and I came with just two suitcases.

“When we wanted to take possessions and property with us, they informed us that according to Romanian law, ‘little Jews’ – that’s how they called us – were not allowed to leave with property. We were afraid to say a word. Anything we might say could endanger us and be used against us.”

“Reznic” is a Jewish-Russian surname meaning “shochet” (ritual slaughterer). Indeed, Reznic comes from a family whose roots on his father’s side are deeply rooted in kashrut and shechita.

“All of my father’s family, who were Haredi, were killed in the Holocaust. My mother, of blessed memory, kept tradition, but more in order to ‘do her duty’ – that’s a huge difference in outlook. Because of that, they never really saw eye to eye.

“As a child, I was actually believing – I followed my father, but since I was very attached to my mother, I leaned more toward her worldview. My mother did not want me to invest in studying at Talmud Torah. She didn’t want me to dig too deeply; she wanted me to learn just enough to be able to say that I had learned. I, on the other hand, insisted on studying, and I pleaded with her: ‘Mom, let me learn so I won’t be an ignoramus.’”

When did your love story with the violin begin?

“When I was five I started playing, and it happened more or less by mistake. My father was very angry about that ‘mistake’. My mother wanted me to be a musician, while my father asked: ‘What does it mean to be a violinist?’ He wanted me to study medicine and thought that a child must learn his father’s profession.

“The truth is that he didn’t only think that – he acted on it. At age 12, my father took me once a week to the hospital so that I would begin being exposed to pathology. When I entered the morgue, I panicked. I was afraid I would throw up from the stress. My father was not moved by my reaction. He sewed a white coat for me and reassured me that everything would be fine.

“At that time they didn’t keep the dead in refrigerated rooms. They were laid out on tables, and a huge block of ice cooled their bodies. It was terrible and frightening. After I did my ‘training’ in pathology, my father took me to the ward to make rounds among heart patients. He didn’t give me any freedom; he really ‘latched onto’ me. He was serious. But after a whole year in which I was exposed closely to the world of medicine – I couldn’t do it anymore. I was just a 12-year-old boy, before bar mitzvah, and it is not exactly something that fills your heart with joy to see dead people.”

“My sister Miriam was a year older than me. When she was six, she studied music at the conservatory, and I waited for her outside. I actually found it boring. One day, a Gypsy music teacher with a moustache down to his knees passed by and suggested that I learn to play. My mother agreed, and I was forced to go to lessons, while inside I wanted to play soccer and basketball.

“When I came into the lesson, he gave me a large violin and I was shaking all over from excitement. He said to me: ‘From the way you hold the bow and the violin – you will be a great violinist.’ At age nine I began to really love playing. I would play four to five hours a day. My mother made it clear to me that if I didn’t want to continue, I didn’t have to. She said: ‘If you play – it’s for yourself.’ This time it was for me. I practiced many hours and became very attached to the violin.”

The biblical kinor (which was probably not a bowed instrument) is the first musical instrument mentioned in the Tanach, where it says it was among the first instruments ever invented: “And his brother’s name was Yuval; he was the father of all who play the kinor and the ugav” (Bereishit 4:21).

This instrument is mentioned, together with the nevel, many times in the Book of Tehillim and in connection with King David, both in the stories about him and in relation to the renewal of the Temple in the days of Ezra and Nechemiah, where the instrument is then called “the kinor of King David.” To this day, the violin is considered a tool strongly identified with Jews and with Gypsies.

(Photo: Ari Shor)

In Communist Romania you couldn’t freely express your Jewish identity. How did you manage?

“At that time, almost every home was bugged. People didn’t know it, but their homes were wired with microphones and listening devices, so everything that was said was recorded and reported to the authorities. I discovered this fact by chance only when I was 18. Until then, we spoke freely at home. Who would suspect that conversations were being recorded?

“One evening, on the third night of Chanukah, when I was 13, my father decided that I should play classical music on the violin in front of the Jewish community. I didn’t actually know how to play the melodies he asked for, but he assumed I would manage – and that’s what happened. I don’t know how, but in practice I didn’t play out of tune. Everyone applauded and cheered for me, and my father was pleased.

“When the evening ended, we went out into the cold and snow and started walking home, while I was holding my Italian violin in my hand. We had a fairly long way to walk until the exit from the synagogue compound. Suddenly, we saw a jeep in front of us, from which four strong men in leather coats and hats on their heads got out. They stopped us and prevented us from continuing.

“The first thing that came to my mind was that I had to save my violin. I didn’t know what they wanted, and somehow I managed to slip away, retrace my steps back to the synagogue, and entrust my violin to a 72-year-old Jewish man who was there. That move cost me dearly – very dearly. When they caught me, I got a brutal beating. Luckily, because of the cold I didn’t feel the full force of it.

“I was covered in blood, but that didn’t stop them from dragging me to a cell, where I was held for about three months. We were beaten right and left. To this day, the doctors don’t understand how I’m alive – I suffered 84 fractures and 14 breaks that healed. While we were under arrest, my mother didn’t know why we hadn’t come home.

“When I was finally released from prison, it was close to springtime. The police ordered me to tell my mother that we had gone to buy cigarettes at the grocery store and that there was a long line, so we were delayed. When I asked, ‘Why did you arrest me?’ they claimed we had done anti-Communist propaganda. That’s how they interpreted Chanukah songs. To this day I have trauma from it.”

A Visit to the Lubavitcher Rebbe

“My meeting with the Rebbe took place even before I became fully observant. Like many other Jews who visit New York, I also went to receive a dollar. I stood in line, and after six hours I reached the Rebbe. When we met, he gave a dollar to each member of my family and asked me to wait for him in his office.

“When I entered his room, there was such an intense energy that I almost choked. Not everyone can stand in a moment like that. He was an extremely spiritual person. He came in after 45 minutes, and what happened there was both deeply moving and overwhelming. My knees were literally shaking before the Rebbe. I understood that we were spiritually connected. It was like a Pandora’s box had opened. It was intangible. I felt wrapped in infinite love. I couldn’t walk. I was like a drunk. They brought me water and food. After that, we stayed in contact. I saw him once more before his passing.”

Following that meeting, Reznic began to keep Shabbat and eat kosher food, but he still did not make a full, essential change in his life. “I didn’t study Torah at that stage and I didn’t keep regular prayers,” he says. Years later, in 2009, he fully embraced religious observance.

“Seventeen and a half million people in the world know me, and out of the millions of violinists in the world, I was declared one of the ten top violinists on earth. It’s crazy. I felt that my ego could reach the heavens, and that is not a good place to be. I decided to work on myself and nullify my ego. I began doing teshuva and working on myself. I understood the smallness of a human being, and the fact that, in relation to the world, he is like a grain of sand – nothing more.

“I understood that I had to put my ego aside. I didn’t want a life of abundance for its own sake; I wanted meaning and truth.”

The Passing of His Sister

Reznic's only and older sister, Miriam, died of a serious illness. “There was a very warm connection between us. I was in great sorrow, but I understand that this is God’s will – it’s not a punishment. The Holy One, blessed be He, does only good. Evil exists only in the moment when a person thinks about something in his mind that he shouldn’t be thinking about.

“‘Ra’ (evil) is an acronym for reshut atzmit (self-permission). If a person permits himself, for example, to speak lashon hara and slander – that is ‘ra’, meaning self-permission. Ra is not the opposite of good; ra means I allowed myself to cross the line. A person has to know that everything has an expiration date. There is a ‘cash register’, and in the end you have to pay.”