This story aired in the July 7, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Mandolin orchestras were everywhere during the early 20th Century. Today there are still scores of them in major cities across the U.S., including San Francisco. It turns out that the Bay Area is the birthplace of a mandolin super-group founded by a man who doesn't even play the instrument. He wanted to honor the memory of a Jewish mandolin ensemble whose members perished in the Holocaust.
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The Ger Mandolin Orchestra's musical director is Mike Marshall who lives in the Montclair section of Oakland with his mandolin-playing wife Caterina Lichtenberg. Marshall is a mandolin virtuoso who has played bluegrass, jazz and classical music. He’s collaborated with musicians who were veterans of string band music and then wandered outside of the folk and bluegrass genres. The great mandolinist David Grisman, who spent many years in Mill Valley, is one of them.
When I visited Marshall at home he showed me mandolins, a banjo, a guitar and some exotic stringed instruments hanging on a wall. Then he introduced me to members of the mandolin family, beginning with a mando-bass.
“Here we have papa bear,” Marshall said as he played a few licks on the triangular instrument that is more than a hundred years old.
Then he demonstrated a mandocello, a mandolin as big as a guitar. Marshall has been recording Bach’s cello suites on a mandocello in recent years.
Finally, he took out his Gibson F-5 mandolin, a Lloyd Loar model made in 1924. They sell for huge sums.
“This is considered the gold standard that most American mandolinists are playing. And most of the builders who are building them are trying to get back to this beautiful sound,” he explained before picking a soulful bluegrass melody on the F-5.
The person responsible for the formation of the Ger Mandolin Orchestra – a businessman named Avner Yonai – doesn’t even play the mandolin. He grew up in Israel and emigrated to America, where he co-founded a successful moving company in the Bay Area.
Yonai saw the feature film "Everything Is Illuminated," which was released in 2005. Adapted from the novel of the same name, it’s a fictional story of a young American Jew who travels to Ukraine searching for the roots of his family. Some of them survived the Holocaust by fleeing their shtetl or small village.
“I guess I just wanted to see where my grandfather grew up, where I would be now if he hadn’t come to America,” the film’s protagonist tells a Ukrainian tour guide who took him to the shtetl.
"Everything Is Illuminated" resonated deeply with Yonai, who, like the protagonist of the film, initially knew little about his family’s life in Eastern Europe. They lived in Poland in a town Yiddish speakers called Ger. The Poles called it Gora Kalwaria.
“My grandfather left Poland in 1935,” Yonai told an interviewer in 2013 at Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival. “He was a Zionist and he immigrated together with a few other members from the halutz [pioneer] movement... My grandfather never went back to Poland after the war. He never told us about his life before the war.”
In late February 1941 Gora Kalwaria’s 3,500 Jews — about half of its population -- were rounded up and sent to Warsaw, 23 miles away. From Warsaw they were transported to the Treblinka death camp. Yonai’s great grandparents were among those who perished in Treblinka.
Eventually, Yonai learned about the existence of the town’s mandolin orchestra from one of the few Jews of Gora Kalwaria who survived the Holocaust. That survivor pointed out three of Yonai’s relatives in a photograph of the ensemble.
“My grandfather, David Rybak, was a member of this orchestra,” said Yonai. “His brother, Beryl Rybak, was the conductor and the manager of the orchestra and another brother, Shlomo, also played in the orchestra. There were 11 [members] all together. Most of the members of this orchestra perished with the entire Jewish community that lived there [in Gora Kalwaria] for hundreds of years.”
Yonai erected a monument to Gora Kalwaria’s dead in the town’s Jewish cemetery, which had been desecrated by the Nazis. But he wanted to create a living monument and decided that the way to do that was to recreate the Ger Mandolin Orchestra. So, Yonai contacted Ellie Shapiro, who produced the Bay Area’s once-annual Jewish Music Festival for 30 years.
“It’s such a wonderful way to honor the memory of those who are gone,” Shapiro told me. “Music is life. And it’s healing. It’s a cliché but it’s true. Music is healing.”
Shapiro reached out to Mike Marshall, whom she had met years before at the Klezmer Mania! festival at Zellerbach Hall and told him about the mandolin orchestra project.
“I said, ‘Well, this is a great idea. I’m all in,’ Marshall recalled. “I was totally up for it, especially once I met [Yonai] and heard his story and realized how profound and how powerful an idea this is. Knowing the history, this horror, and yet, you’re thinking, ‘Well, damn it, we’re going to bring it back to life.’”
Mandolin orchestras were everywhere in the U.S. during the early 20th Century. Today there are still scores of them in major cities across the U.S.. including Sam Francisco. But what Mike Marshall had in mind was a mandolin supergroup made up of the best mandolinists in North America. He called Don Stiernberg, the great jazz mandolinist in Chicago, Jeff Warschauer, the veteran klezmer mandolinist in New York, and Eric Stein, the arranger and bass mandolinist in Toronto.
“It was very easy, Marshall said with a laugh. “It was just one phone call. ‘You interested?’ Boom! ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ Everybody was very excited about it.”
In the spring of 2011, Marshall assembled an 11-member ensemble, the same size as the original Ger Mandolin Orchestra in Poland. Yonai paid for members to fly to the Bay Area. He also covered their lodging, which Marshall estimates was a six-figure tab.
The new Ger Mandolin Orchestra gathered a week before its inaugural performance and started rehearsing.
“I’m a pretty good bandleader in terms of letting people have a voice but also keeping it on track and directing things,” said Marshall. “And so, we kept it light and fun but worked all day for four or five days to develop a sound. After the second or third day, we started jelling and getting that feeling that we were really a band.”
On March 6, 2011 the new Ger Mandolin Orchestra debuted as part of the 26th annual Jewish Music Festival. The Freight & Salvage in Berkeley was sold out.
“That’s when I probably felt for the first time the magnitude of the project and how much power it had kind of hidden within the music and the story,” Marshall said.
The Ger Mandolin Orchestra starts its concerts playing "Sholom Alechim," a song that Jews sing to usher in the Sabbath. David Grisman arranged it as a mandolin instrumental for "Songs of Our Fathers," an album he did with the mandolin virtuoso Andy Statman. At the Freight and Salvage concert Marshall asked the audience to refrain from applauding at its conclusion because the song can be considered a prayer. The audience complied with the request.
“Freight and Salvage is one of the premier places in the country for folk music,” noted Shapiro. “Not a bad seat in the house and the acoustics are great. It was a gift to be able to have access to that venue.”
Six months after its debut in Berkeley, the new Ger Mandolin Orchestra travelled to Poland to perform in Gora Kalwaria. There, members of the group visited the Jewish cemetery. The orchestra also performed in Warsaw. In 2013, it played before an audience of Holocaust survivors in Toronto, returning in 2024. It performed at a Jewish museum in Manhattan in December 2024.
“It is important to continue playing the music that was silenced by murdering the orchestra, to have the music continue,” said Yonai. “That’s very meaningful for us.”
Last year the orchestra recorded material for its first album. Mike Marshall says they hope to release the recording by the end of 2025.
Special thanks to Eric Stein and the Ashkenaz Festival, David Luke and Alex Kalish for helping with this story.