Joshua Bell plays benefit concert for museum of Polish Jews

AFP

WARSAW - US virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell played a benefit concert Wednesday in Warsaw at Poland's National Opera raising funds for an unprecedented Jewish museum under construction in the Polish capital.
"Thank you for becoming our associates in this wonderful endeavour -- our and my dream come true," Sigmund A. Rolat, the chairman of the North American Council of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews told concert goers just prior to Bell's performance.

Joshua Bell plays benefit concert for museum of Polish Jews
The cornerstone of the long-awaited museum was laid in June. Its construction is seen as a major step toward reviving Poland's near millennium of Jewish heritage obliterated by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
In the works for a decade, the long-awaited multi-million dollar, multi-media facility is expected to open its door in 2011.
Poland's First Lady Maria Kaczynska and Senate Speaker Bogdan Borusewicz were among the dignitaries that attended the Wednesday gala concert, where seats sold for up to several hundred euro (dollars) each.
To a full house, Bell, 41, played the legendary Gibson Stradivarius violin that once belonged to Bronislaw Huberman, a prodigy who as a boy played the works of Johannes Brahms for the German composer himself.
Wednesday's concert programme included a Brahms' violin concerto and Symphony No. 1.
The future Museum of the History of Polish Jews is to face an imposing black stone monument dedicated to those who died the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is being built in a district of Warsaw that during the Holocaust was inside the infamous Warsaw Ghetto.
Nazi Germany imprisoned more than 400,000 Polish Jews inside its confines, the vast majority of whom died of starvation or disease or were sent to death camps.
Slated to cost a total 144 million dollars (102 million euro), the museum is being co-funded by the Polish government, the city of Warsaw and funds raised from private and institutional donors world-wide.
Prior to World War II, Poland was home to some 3.5 million Jews, roughly 10 percent of its pre-war population with nearly a millennium of Jewish settlement within its borders.
Some three million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust which claimed six million of pre-WWII Europe's estimated 11 million Jews.
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