Shown here is a rare and dramatic postcard that stunningly depicts Arturo Toscanini after conducting the historic first (December 26, 1936) concert by the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra before a packed Italian Pavilion on the grounds of the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv – with attendees including Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Golda Meir – signed by the conductor and dated January 2, 1937. Generally considered the greatest maestro of all time, he led the symphony in playing Brahms Second Symphony; Shubert’s Unfinished Symphony; and, in a purposeful and pointed mocking of the Nazi regime he so loathed, a scherzo by the Jewish Felix Mendelssohn.
Although photographed standing next to Toscanini after the concert, Bronislaw Huberman (1882-1947), the internationally venerated master of the violin who had worked so hard to assemble and establish the orchestra, did not actually play in that famous first concert. A deeply modest man, he preferred that his musicians capture the headlines and the limelight. As it turned out, it was not until 1938 that he was able to play with his orchestra due to a serious hand injury he sustained a in a plane accident in October 1937 over Sumatra in which four passengers were killed.
The Israel Philharmonic was founded in 1936 as the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra by Huberman, whose plan was to organize in Eretz Yisrael one of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras, “a second and greater Salzburg.” An internationalist and a man more European than Jewish, his thinking was dramatically changed during his first visit to Eretz Yisrael (1929) and, by the time of his second visit (January 1931) he had begun to form his vision of creating an orchestra there. By 1934, he had met with prominent Jews in Eretz Yisrael and had begun persuading influential people around the world to invest time and money in the proposed venture. He embarked on an ambitious concert tour through the United States that included 42 concerts in two months and, despite an ever-worsening international economy, he successfully raised substantial funds for the orchestra.
For more than a decade, Huberman had been a regular performer with the Berlin Philharmonic, but when Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany and began implementing anti-Semitic policies (1933), he refused an invitation from conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to appear with him, explaining in an article that he published in The Manchester Guardian that he could not forgive German intellectuals for their acquiescence to Nazi policies and actions. Upon resigning from the teaching staff of the Vienna State Academy (1936), he returned to Eretz Yisrael and quickly came to the realization that the creation of an orchestra would have the additional benefit of helping many European Jewish orchestral musicians who had been left jobless by the Nazis. “One has to build a fist against anti-Semitism, and a first-class orchestra will be that fist,” he said.
Thus, what had originally been merely a cultural institution for Eretz Yisrael now became also an emergency rescue for victims of Nazism as refugees, many of them prominent musicians, joined Huberman and his embryonic orchestra. In this manner, Huberman became one of the great unsung heroes of the Holocaust, saving almost 1,000 Jewish lives.
For the Jewish community, the influx of so many world-class musicians provided a tremendous cultural stimulus and generated great pride. Their delight grew exponentially when the chair of the American Association of Friends of the Palestine Orchestra – a skilled violinist named Albert Einstein – assisted Huberman with a 1936 fundraising dinner in New York and when Toscanini agreed shortly thereafter to cancel his scheduled engagements and to conduct the opening concerts in Tel Aviv. The maestro’s authority and reputation were such that his mere involvement with the nascent orchestra brought it to the world’s attention and to immediately give it international standing. When Einstein learned that Toscanini had agreed to serve as the orchestra’s first conductor, the ecstatic scientist wrote to him:
