In 1933, the promising young Jewish German violinist Ernest Drucker left the stage midway through a Brahms concerto in Cologne at the behest of Nazi officials, in one of the first anti-Semitic acts of the new regime.

Now, more than 80 years later, his son, Grammy Award-winning American violinist Eugene Drucker, has completed his father’s interrupted work. With tears in his eyes, Drucker performed an emotional rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, with the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra on May 31.

“I think he would feel a sense of completion. I think in some ways many aspects of my career served that purpose for him,” the 63-year-old Drucker said of his father, who died in 1993. “There is all this emotional energy and intensity loaded into my associations to this piece.”

The concert, also performed on May 28, commemorated the Judischer Kulturbund — a federation of Jewish musicians in Nazi Germany who were segregated so as not to “sully” Aryan culture.

After the humiliation in Cologne, the elder Drucker became a central player in the Kulturbund, a unique historical phenomenon with a mixed legacy. On one hand, it gave Jews the opportunity to carry on with their cultural lives and maintain a sense — some would say the illusion — of normalcy in the midst of growing discrimination against them. On the other, it served a Nazi propaganda machine eager to portray a moderate face to the world.

For the largely assimilated German Jews, who had a deep connection to the country’s culture and history, the Kulturbund offered a much-needed creative outlet as their world was crumbling.

“They wanted to show the Germans why it was important to preserve us and why we were better than they thought we were. There was this delusional sense that this may alter their fate,” said Orit Fogel-Shafran, general manager of the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra. “This was their mistake. They thought this gave them some sort of immunity.”

At its height, the Kulturbund included thousands of musicians, theater actors and other performers. The Kulturbund was reduced significantly after the pogroms of Kristallnacht in 1938. Musicians went underground or fled like Drucker’s father, who went to America in 1938.

As a top student at the Cologne conservatory of music, Ernest Drucker was to play the entire Brahms concerto at his graduation ceremony. Shortly before the event, he noticed his name had been crossed off the program. His teacher threatened to resign if Drucker’s name was not reinstated, and a compromise was reached with the school’s newly installed Nazi administrators whereby Drucker could perform the first movement only before being replaced by a non-Jew.