Nothing seemed to go wrong when a car dropped Jascha Heifetz back at the King David Hotel on April 16, 1953, after a recital at Edison Hall in Jerusalem.
Heifetz had played the program, which included Richard Strauss's E flat violin sonata, to his usual demanding standard and to thunderous applause.
A lone doorman greeted his car, wedged between two police jeeps, when he arrived at the hotel shortly after midnight. Having safely transported Heifetz and his entourage – his bodyguard, his son, his escort – to King David, the jeeps left.
The bodyguard got out of the car first and went through the revolving door of the hotel. Heifetz, carrying his violin case, was next. But before he could enter, the doorman rushed at him, speaking Hebrew words that Heifetz could not understand.
This was no janitor. He held an iron rod in his hand and lowered the weapon into Heifetz's right hand, breaking his arm.
Although Heifetz's violin case prevented the blow, he clutched his hand in pain. As he entered the lobby, his bodyguard ran in pursuit of the assailant, only to find the gob, wrapped in newspaper, a few meters from the hotel.
Seventy years later, the man who attacked Jascha Heifetz has not been located. A faction called Han oar Haivri (or Jewish Youth), later linked to several right-wing extremist groups, claimed responsibility, but no one has ever been held accountable.
Later, a man said he knew the identity of the assailant. This man, a future speaker of the Knesset, had good reason for his knowledge, having direct ties to the illegal group that had sent Heifetz a threatening note about his choice of repertoire.
An unsolved mystery involving a world-renowned violinist, the early years of the State of Israel, the shadows of collective trauma, and the uneasy mix of art and politics — this story ticked all my professional and personal boxes.
Understanding what happened – through interviews with historians and those who knew Heifetz, looking at contemporary newspaper accounts and digging into archives – helped me understand this historical moment at a time when Israel is once again at a critical turning point.
Heifetz was attacked for daring on this tour to play a sonata by Strauss, a composer who then it was banned in Israel for the his Nazi collaborations. In 1953, the state of Israel was only five years old and the Holocaust was still a very vivid memory. Playing the work of German composers—particularly Wagner—could still evoke extreme emotional reactions.
A week before the Jerusalem concert, Heifetz had received a letter from an underground terrorist group: "You should know, as we do, that you dared to play a Nazi tune in the Holy Land on the eve of Yom Hashoah" — or Remembrance of Holocaust Day — "music composed by a partner in the destruction of our people."
The note warned: "Be careful and never repeat this crime again."
Senior government officials begged Heifetz to drop Strauss from his repertoire. But no one could tell Heifetz, who was born in Vilnius and moved to the United States in 1917, what music to play, and the Strauss sonata was a particular favorite. "There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music," Heifetz told the officials.
The public had applaud the sonata in Haifa, the New York Times reported, but in Tel Aviv, he responded with absolute silence.
After the threatening note, Heifetz decided that the Jerusalem recital would go ahead as planned, but with tight security. And any whiff of picketing or protest would drive the Strauss off the schedule.
The man who claimed to know who attacked Heifetz was Dov Silansky. A Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, he was determined never to let himself or Israel forget. In 1989, a year after his election as Knesset speaker, Silansky urged lawmakers to read the names of every Holocaust victim, as six million felt like an incomprehensible number. "Every Person Has a Name" is now part of Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies across Israel.
Shilansky arrived in Israel in 1948 on the Altalena, a ship that sank when the Israel Defense Forces opened fire, killing 19 people. Most on board, including Shilansky, were members of the Irgun, the right-wing underground resistance group.
Shilansky maintained close ties with the group when the Irgun became a political party led by Menachem Begin. In September 1952, the group was concerned about protesting Israel's intention to receive 3 billion marks (or about $715 million) in reparations from Germany. Israel desperately needed the money to absorb the huge number of Holocaust refugees.
Both the right and the left criticized the deal, but the consensus was that reparations could push Israel forward rather than keep it focused on an unspeakable atrocity. Shilansky, now 28 and married with a son, couldn't take it. "I found no rest," he wrote in his memoir Diary of a Jewish Prison. “No matter what I did, this event pierced my brain and pierced it again. I was a citizen of a treacherous nation. My inaction was an endorsement of this treachery."
A month after the reparations agreement was signed, Silanski brought a briefcase containing a device made of six kilograms of explosives to the Israeli Foreign Ministry office in Tel Aviv. The police arrested him before detonating the device and was sentenced to 21 months in prison.
He was in prison when the deal went into effect on March 27, 1953 — three weeks before the attack on Heifetz outside the King David Hotel. And he would still be in prison when a dozen members of another extremist group, Malchut Yisrael, were convicted in August of attempting to bomb the Ministry of Education building.
Heifetz was not seriously injured in the attack beyond bruises and eventually some scarring. His violin was not damaged either. But his attack appeared to chastise Israel's media and chattering classes.
Before, the Israeli press seemed almost gleeful in its attacks on Heifetz for daring to play music by a banned composer. But as international newspapers, including the Times, they showed intense attention, the tone was set more accommodating. Even the group that claimed responsibility for the attack, in a call to the Voice of Israel radio station, said they had intended to damage Heifetz's violin, not him.
Heifetz now had to decide: continue his tour or leave Israel? His instinct was to leave, furious, "that music had become a political pawn," as he remembered his son Robert in a 1988 article for The Strad magazine. But the same officials who had begged Heifetz to drop the Strauss sonata now urged him to continue. So did David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister.
Two days after the attack, over tea, Ben-Gurion apologized to Heifetz on behalf of the nation. As he later wrote in his diary, asked Heifetz to go ahead and "play Strauss as well."
Heifetz continued. But the Strauss sonata was not on the program of his next concert, a benefit in Rehovot for the Chaim Weizmann Institute. However, security guards and police filled the concert hall, although the only mishap was when the police noisily tried to disperse a group of screaming pigeons on the roof.
Despite having to hold his bow "rather carefully between thumb and forefinger", Heifetz was his usual near flawless self. The audience applauded enthusiastically. But his bowing arm was still sore and he canceled his final appearance in Tel Aviv.
Three days later, with his arm still bandaged, Heifetz was back on tour, playing in Italy.
Dov Shilansky became and started his own company. When the Likud party came to power in 1977, making Menachem Begin prime minister, Begin rewarded Silanski's longtime friend with a deputy minister position.
In 1982, Shilansky told historian Tom Segev that he knew who had attacked Heifetz, but would not say who it was. By then, Shilansky was embroiled in another music-related controversy.
At the end of an Israel Philharmonic concert in 1981, the orchestra's conductor, Indian-born Zubin Mehta, told the audience that the encore would be Richard Wagner; anyone who felt uncomfortable was free to leave, he said, and the musicians would not be offended . (A violinist and trombonist, both Holocaust survivors, dropped out.)
It was Wagner's first official performance in Israel since 1938, and reactions quickly turned ugly. The attacks on the press brought up all the old arguments, but Shilansky added something new.
In a radio interview, he took umbrage at Mehta's chutzpah and suggested he "go back to India". He later said his comments had been taken out of context: he meant Mehta should "leave the Israelis alone".
Begin said little publicly, but privately defended Silansky in a letter to the Israel Philharmonic: “He saw our people in the process of annihilation. He himself was in a Nazi concentration camp."
Was Silanski responsible for the attack on Heifetz? The time frame doesn't seem to work. Silanski was released from prison only months after the attack. And he didn't match the description of the perpetrator: a "tall, dark-skinned thug."
However, several newspaper reports report that on April 12, Silanski was granted a 10-day leave for the birth of his second son. (That son, Shafir Shilansky, also a lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.) Begin was the boy's godfather. Silanski would be free when Heifetz received the blow on the bowing arm.
When I mentioned this to Segev, he insisted that Shilansky was not the aggressive type, that it was not his style. "It makes absolutely no sense," Segev said. I tend to agree. A more plausible culprit may be a member of Malchut Yisrael convicted in August 1953. Most were minors; their whereabouts at the time could not be definitively ascertained.
As Silanski rose to power, his vociferous criticism of attempts to play German composers and his impassioned arguments that even speaking the German language could cause terrible damage, they never wavered. But what he knew about Heifetz's attack he took to the grave.
For me, the attack on Heifetz became less a mystery to be solved than a thorny emotional and political journey into the heart of Israel's founding, a reminder of its contradictions and aspirations. For Heifetz it was simpler.
"He just thought it was a stupid thing for this man to do," Ayke Agus, author of "Heifetz as I Knew Him" and his close friend, said in an interview. "He told anyone who called him for an interview that he didn't like mixing politics and music."
Anna Lou Dehavenon, the widow of pianist William Kapell, told Heifetz biographer John A. Maltese about meeting Heifetz for dinner in Paris during his 1953 tour. "I said to Jascha, 'What happened to your hand? ?” And, of course, he didn't want to talk about it."
Heifetz remained an active supporter of Israel. He last visited in 1970 for a five-week tour with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. When he met Prime Minister Golda Meir, Heifetz gave her a check for about $25,000 and told her to "use it as you see fit."
This journey may have been more harmonious because of another decision Heifetz made: Early drafts of his recital programs included a Strauss piece, but he chose not to play it.
*Cover photo: Jascha Heifetz, here in a 1933 portrait, toured Israel in April 1953. On his program: a sonata by Richard Strauss that was banned at the time for its Nazi ties.Credit…Ullstein Bild, via Getty Images
Source: nytimes