Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer stepped up to an 800-pound gjallarhorn and exhaled with all he had to launch the festivities officially inaugurating the team’s $1.1 billion stadium.
Music lovers would have found the deep, uneven sound revolting, but the Nordic instrument is plenty melodic in inspiring Vikings partisans.
The team’s owner, Mark Wilf, 54, whose family has deep philanthropic roots, offered a Jewish take on the gigantic horn.
“When we first bought the team, a rabbi in St. Paul said, ‘You realize that the horns on the helmet are shofars.’ I kind of chuckle about that sometimes,” Wilf, sitting 50 feet from the newly installed horn, said in an interview just before the stadium’s dedication last month.
“It’s something the fans bond around: The Vikings are coming! There’s something — I don’t want to say sacred, but really special — about a football game-day experience.”
Wilf and his brother Zygi, 66, along with several other relatives, bought the National Football League franchise in 2005 and attend all the games, home and away. The brothers fly in from New Jersey, where they run the family’s real estate business.
As kids, they attended New York Giants games with their father, Joseph, a Holocaust survivor from Poland — as is their mother, Elizabeth, who is in her late 80s. Less than two weeks after the stadium’s dedication, Joseph Wilf, a founder of one of the country’s largest real estate development companies and a major philanthropist, died at 91.
Much of Mark Wilf’s philanthropic energy goes toward assisting Holocaust survivors.
William Daroff, director of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Washington office, credited Wilf with helping to raise $30 million since early 2015 to benefit the organization’s National Holocaust Survivors Initiative, which assists some of the approximately 25 percent of the 120,000 survivors in the United States who live in poverty.
JFNA’s president, Jerry Silverman, said Wilf followed up personally to assure that a fellow philanthropist’s Holocaust-survivor relative received improved medical care.
“These people should live out their lives with dignity,” said Wilf, who recalled the many survivors among his parents’ circle of friends in Hillside, New Jersey.
The opening of U.S. Bank Stadium on the site of the Vikings’ former home, the Metrodome, heralds a new era that Wilf hopes finally will include a Super Bowl victory — all four of the Vikings’ Super Bowl appearances so far have resulted in losses.
The Vikings opened the 2016 season with a road game and make their regular-season debut in the new digs on Sunday, Sept. 18, against the division-rival Green Bay Packers.
Last month’s ribbon-cutting ceremony capped the owners’ prolonged effort to build a new stadium, a process that included contentious negotiations with the state’s governors and legislature. The owners eventually agreed to pay approximately half the construction costs.
The massive building is an architectural amalgam. Some of the exterior is darkly foreboding and some airily welcoming, with sections angling out sharply toward the streets and conjuring ships. Indoors, one side of the field and stands is bathed in sunlight thanks to a transparent roof, while the other is shaded. Behind one end zone, five enormous doors up to 90 feet high can hydraulically pivot to bring the outside in. The 66,000 seats are all purple.
Wilf recalled the Giants games he attended long ago, when his father’s construction clients included former players. The outings, he said, “got us exposed to football early on,” and also to maintaining perspective considering their parents’ difficult past.
“My dad, considering what he went through, always had an optimistic bent on things, so whenever we’d be heartbroken as kids about the Giants losing a game, he’d say, ‘Things could be worse — you could be the owners.’ ”
The football outings, which included a trip to Southern California to watch the Giants’ Super Bowl victory in 1987, were “our family bonding experience,” he said. “Those types of things were special. Now our kids come to the games. It’s a family experience.”
In Minneapolis, the clan established the Wilf Family Center at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital. The institution is meaningful, too, to Vikings center John Sullivan, who said his brother Bob once received key medical treatment at another pediatric hospital.
“We have a very common, shared interest,” said Sullivan, who with his wife, Ariel, contributes to the Minnesota institution. “I have a whole lot of respect for [the Wilfs’] philanthropic endeavors.”
The next day, Elizabeth Wilf looked on from a lunch-laden table set atop the field as Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and other dignitaries spoke. Her sons sandwiched the governor, each grasping a golden scissor to cut a purple ribbon running the stage’s length of about 30 yards.
The event was “a great personal milestone for our family, in addition to a great milestone for the community,” Mark Wilf said. “We’re very proud that we have a new home here for the Vikings and that the Vikings have a stability and a future for generations to come.”