Milan, Italy
A few years ago, a gracious woman in her nineties, Signora Morpurgo, arrived at the Violins of Hope workshop in Tel Aviv with her three daughters. In their hands they carried a deeply treasured family heirloom—the violin of Gualtiero Morpurgo, the beloved patriarch of their family from Milan, Italy.
The Morpurgos are an ancient and respected Jewish family, their roots tracing back over five centuries in northern Italy. When Gualtiero was a young boy, his mother handed him a violin with these words:
“You may not become a famous violinist, but music will help you in desperate moments of life and widen your horizons. Do not give up—sooner or later it will prove me right.”
Her wisdom would one day become a lifeline. When the Nazis occupied Italy, Gualtiero’s mother was forced onto the first deportation train from Milan—wagon 06, bound for Auschwitz. Gualtiero himself was sent to a forced labor camp, and true to his mother’s words, he carried his violin with him. In the freezing nights, after long days of grueling work, he found strength and solace in the music of Bach’s Partitas, played with numb, frostbitten fingers.
Before the war, Gualtiero had studied engineering in Ancona and worked in the shipyards of Genoa. After liberation, he used his technical skills to help rebuild a shattered world—volunteering for Aliyah Bet, the underground effort to bring Holocaust survivors to Palestine. For his service, he was later awarded the Medal of Jerusalem in 1992 by Yitzhak Rabin.
Gualtiero never stopped playing. Music remained his companion through every chapter of his life. When age finally quieted his hands at ninety-seven, he placed his violin in its case for the last time. After his passing in 2012, his widow and daughters attended a Violins of Hope concert in Rome—and knew exactly where the instrument belonged.
They donated it to Violins of Hope, so that Gualtiero’s violin could once again fill great concert halls with sound, carrying forward the legacy of a man who lived through exile, war, and rebirth—with music as his steadfast guide.
