Bringing Jewish music to the concert hall

In 1943, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels gifted an 18th-century Stradivarius violin to Japanese musician Nejiko Suwa, who just finished playing to Germans wounded in the war. This much is known. But, as Carla Shapreau writes, the origin of the violin is much less clear:
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In its first of a new annual series of Hanukkah-time performances, Pro Musica Hebraica pays homage to the Golden Age of Cantors and to the liturgical music of modern times in From Psalm to Lamentation: A Concert of Cantorial Masterpieces on December 2nd in New York City and again on December 6th in Washington, D.C. The music traces a rich tradition of cantorial masterpieces sung by one of the great practitioners of the cantorial arts, Netanel Hershtik, who will be joined by the Hampton Synagogue Choir and Amernet String Quartet.

Here is Hershtik performing at the Thanksgiving concert at the Hampton Synagogue last year:

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Professor Jenna Weissman Joselit writes in The Forward on the importance of revisiting the works of the influential composer Lazare Saminsky:
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Anne Midgette, the Washington Post’s classical music critic, writes about the increasing interest in recording the works of little-known composers:
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Katharina Wagner

The Daily Mail reports:

A feud has broken out between members of the Wagner opera family in Germany as the leader of the clan threatens legal action unless they co-operate with a ‘moral house cleaning’ aimed at de-Nazifying the world’s leading opera festival

Katharina Wagner, who now directs the annual Bayreuth Festival of Richard Wagner’s operas, wants family members to turn over every document they have in a bid to exorcise the ghosts of the Third Reich – including ‘potentially explosive’ letters penned by Hitler to Winifred Wagner, the Englishwoman who became head of the family in wartime….

Amélie Hohmann, granddaughter of Winifred Wagner, the English-born bride of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried, who became one of Hitler’s closest confidantes and irrevocably bound the festival up with the Nazi cause, is against this – because she has what are described as ‘explosive’ letters between her grandmother and Hitler among masses of sealed paperwork that forms part of her estate.