By Hillel Kuttler

MINNEAPOLIS (JTA) – Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer stepped up to an 800-pound gjallarhorn and exhaled with all he had to launch the festivities that officially inaugurated the team’s $1.1 billion stadium. Music lovers may find the uneven sound revolting, but the Nordic instrument is inspiring to Vikings fans.

The team’s owner, Mark Wilf, 54, 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 with JTA 24 hours 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 would know. He 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.

And 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.

The opening of U.S. Bank Stadium on the site of the Vikings’ former home, the Metrodome, heralds a new era that Wilf hopes will include an NFL championship – a title that has eluded the organization since its founding in 1961. 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 seats 66,000.

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.’”

Much of Wilf’s philanthropic energy goes toward assisting Holocaust survivors.

William Daroff, director of the Jewish Federations of North America’s (JFNA) 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.

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.

The next day, Elizabeth Wilf looked on as her sons cut a purple ribbon to open the stadium. Said Wilf, “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.”

(Mark Wilf is a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent organization.)