Nothing seemed amiss 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 exacting standards and to thunderous applause.
A lone doorman greeted his car, sandwiched between two police Jeeps, when it arrived at the hotel just after midnight. Having safely ferried Heifetz and his entourage — his bodyguard, his son, his accompanist — to the King David, the Jeeps drove away.
The bodyguard got out of the car first and went through the hotel’s revolving door. Heifetz, carrying his violin case, was next. But before he could enter, the doorman rushed up to him, speaking Hebrew words Heifetz couldn’t understand.
This was no doorman. He held an iron bar in his hand and brought the weapon down on Heifetz’s right arm, smashing his hand.
Though Heifetz’s violin case deflected the blow, he clutched his hand in pain. As he entered the lobby, his bodyguard ran in pursuit of the attacker but found only the bar, wrapped in newspaper, a few feet from the hotel.
Seventy years later, the man who attacked Jascha Heifetz has not been identified. A faction called Han oar Haivri (or Hebrew Youth), later linked to several right-wing extremist groups, took responsibility, but no one has ever been held accountable.
Later, one man said he knew the assailant’s identity. This man, a future speaker of the Knesset, had good reason for his knowledge, having direct ties to the underground group that had sent Heifetz a threatening note about his choice of repertoire.
An unsolved mystery involving a world-renowned violinist, the State of Israel’s early years, the shadows of collective trauma, and the uneasy mix of art and politics — this story ticked all of my professional and personal boxes.
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Figuring out what happened — through interviews with historians and those who knew Heifetz, looking at contemporary newspaper accounts and digging in archives — helped me make sense of this historical moment at a time when Israel is once again at a critical inflection point.
HEIFETZ WAS ATTACKED because he had dared on this tour to play the sonata by Strauss, a composer then banned in Israel for his Nazi collaborations. In 1953, the State of Israel was just five years old and the Holocaust was still a very live memory. Playing the work of German composers — particularly Wagner — could still provoke extreme emotional reactions.
A week before the Jerusalem concert, Heifetz had received a letter from an underground terrorist group: “You ought to know, as we do, that you dared play a Nazi melody in the Holy Land on the eve of Yom Hashoah” — or Holocaust Remembrance Day — “music composed by a partner to the destruction of our people.”
The note warned: “Beware and never again repeat this crime.”
Top government officials implored Heifetz to drop the 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.
Audiences had applauded the sonata in Haifa, The New York Times reported, but in Tel Aviv, responded with stony silence.
After the threatening note, Heifetz decided the Jerusalem recital would go on as planned but with tightened security. And any whiff of pickets or protests would scuttle the Strauss from the program.
THE MAN WHO CLAIMED to know who attacked Heifetz was Dov Shilansky. 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, Shilansky urged lawmakers to read the names of each Holocaust victim, as six million felt like an incomprehensible number. “Every Person Has a Name” is now part of Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies all across Israel.
Shilansky arrived in Israel in 1948 on the Altalena, a ship that sank when Israeli Defense Forces opened fire, killing 19 people. Most on the ship, Shilansky included, were members of Irgun, the right-wing underground resistance group.
Shilansky maintained close ties to the group when Irgun morphed into a political party headed by Menachem Begin. In September 1952 the group was concerned with protesting Israel’s intent to receive 3 billion marks (or about $715 million) in reparations from Germany. Israel desperately needed the money to absorb the enormous number of Holocaust refugees.
Both the right and left criticized the agreement, but consensus was that reparations could spur Israel forward rather than keep it focusing on an unspeakable atrocities. Shilansky, now 28 and married with a son, could not abide this. “I found no rest,” he wrote in his memoir “Diary of a Hebrew Jail.” “Whatever I did, that fact pierced my brain and pierced it again. I was a citizen of a treasonous nation; my inaction was one endorsement of that treason.”
A month after the reparations agreement was signed, Shilansky brought a briefcase containing a device made out of six pounds of explosives to the office of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. Police arrested him before the device detonated, and he received a 21-month prison sentence.
He was in jail when the agreement 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 WASN’T SERIOUSLY INJURED in the attack beyond bruising and an eventual scar. Nor did his violin sustain any damage. But his assault seemed to chasten Israel’s media and chattering classes.
Before, the Israeli press had seemed almost gleeful in its attacks on Heifetz for daring to play music by a banned composer. But as international papers, including The Times, hotly took notice, the tone became more conciliatory. Even the group that took responsibility for the attack, in a call to the Voice of Israel radio station, said it intended to damage Heifetz’s violin, not him.
Heifetz now had to decide: should he continue his tour or leave Israel? His instinct was to flee, enraged, “that music had been made a political pawn,” as his son Robert recalled in a 1988 article for The Strad magazine. But the same officials who had implored Heifetz to nix the Strauss sonata now urged him to carry on. So, too, did David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister.
Two days after the assault, over tea, Ben-Gurion apologized to Heifetz on behalf of the nation. As he later wrote in his diary, he asked Heifetz to continue, and “to 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. Still, security guards and police filled the concert hall, though the only misadventure was when police noisily tried to break up a band of pigeons cooing on the rooftop.
Despite having to hold his bow “rather gingerly between thumb and forefinger,” Heifetz was his usual near-flawless self. The audience applauded enthusiastically. But his bowing hand still hurt, and he canceled his final appearance in Tel Aviv.
Three days later, hand still bandaged, Heifetz was back on tour, playing in Italy.
DOV SHILANSKY BECAME A LAWYER and started his own firm. When the Likud party swept into power in 1977, making Menachem Begin prime minister, Begin rewarded his longtime friend Shilansky with a deputy minister post.
In 1982, Shilansky told the 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 a concert by the Israeli Philharmonic in 1981, the orchestra’s conductor, the Indian-born Zubin Mehta, told the audience that the encore would be by Richard Wagner; anyone who felt uncomfortable was free to leave, he said, and the musicians would not take offense. (A violinist and trombonist, both Holocaust survivors, walked out.)
It was the first time Wagner had been played officially in Israel since 1938, and reactions quickly turned ugly. Press attacks brought up all the old arguments, but Shilansky added something new.
In a radio interview, he grew angry at Mehta’s chutzpah and suggested that he “go back to India.” He later said his comments had been taken out of context: he’d meant that Mehta should “leave Israelis in peace.”
Begin said little publicly, but privately defended Shilansky 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 SHILANSKY RESPONSIBLE for the attack on Heifetz? The time frame doesn’t seem to work; Shilansky wasn’t released from prison until months after the assault. And he didn’t match the assailant’s description: a “tall, dark thug.”
But several newspaper reports say that on April 12, Shilansky received a 10-day furlough for his second son’s birth. (That son, Shafir Shilansky, also a lawyer, did not return requests for comment.) Begin was the boy’s godfather. Shilansky would have been free when Heifetz received the blow to his bowing arm.
When I brought this up to Segev, he insisted Shilansky wasn’t the attacker, that it wasn’t his style. It “makes absolutely no sense,” Segev said. I’m inclined to agree. A more plausible culprit might be a Malchut Yisrael member convicted in August 1953. Most were minors; their whereabouts at the time could not be definitively established.
As Shilansky rose to power, his vociferous criticism of efforts to play German composers, and his passionate arguments that even speaking the German language could cause tremendous harm, never wavered. But whatever he knew about the Heifetz attack he took to the grave.
FOR ME, THE ATTACK on Heifetz became less a mystery to solve than a thorny emotional and political journey to 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 this man did,” Ayke Agus, the author of “Heifetz as I Knew Him” and a close friend, said in an interview. “He would tell anybody who called him up for an interview that he didn’t like to mix politics and music.”
Anna Lou Dehavenon, the widow of pianist William Kapell, told Heifetz’s biographer John A. Maltese about meeting Heifetz for dinner in Paris during his 1953 tour. “I said to Jascha, ‘What has happened to your hand?’ And, of course, he didn’t want to talk about it.”
Heifetz remained an active supporter of Israel. He visited a final time in 1970 for a five-week tour with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Upon meeting prime minister Golda Meir, Heifetz handed her a check for about $25,000 and told her “to do with it as she sees fit.”
This trip 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.
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