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- This documentary tells the story of Rachel and Leon, two young Jewish siblings who were sheltered by a working class family in the Nazi-occupied town of Compiegne, France, during World War II. When the children's parents did not return they were "adopted" into the Catholic family. These two children were the only Jews in Compiegne during the entire war. Now living in the United States they return to France for their "adopted" mother's 90th birthday party. The film includes interviews with all the surviving principals in the story, scenes of Rachel and Leon visiting the old apartment from which their parents were deported, and archival photographs and home movies.
- Family drama and historical truth collide in this film about the painful legacy cast by Hanns Ludin, a prominent Nazi executed for war crimes in 1947. In this documentary, Hanns Ludin's son, filmmaker Malte Ludin, breaks 60 years of silence and repression, investigating his father's dark deeds and interviewing his still-denying sisters. The film is an intimate look at the descendants of a Nazi perpetrator, most of whom refuse to accept the history of their family and of Nazi Germany more generally.
- Through intimate scenes with her father and grandmother, Greenberg depicts the struggle to balance personal needs with familial responsibility.
- One of the last Yiddish films made in Poland before the Nazi invasion, this film tells the story of a mother's persistent struggles to support her three children in pre-war World War II Polish Ukraine. After her family is pulled apart by severe poverty and the turmoil of war, she and her children make their way to New York and turn to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for help.
- During the 1920s, many impoverished Jews searching for a better life made their way to Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region on the Chinese border. This melodrama tells the story of a Jewish family's immigration to Birobidzhan and their experiences as settlers on a collective farm in the area.
- In the summer of 1943, thousands of Jewish refugees in Italian-occupied southern France enjoyed a rare respite from persecution, protected by an unusual force: the occupying Italian Army, who temporarily shielded local and foreign Jews despite pressure from the Germans and the French Vichy administration. In one Alpine village, Saint Martin Vesubie, life was, briefly, renewed as Jews attended synagogues, schools and cafés, and Yiddish was heard as often as French. With the invasion of Nazi troops in September the lull was broken and most of the Jews were deported. Veteran French filmmaker Andre Waksman, whose family survived the Holocaust in southern France, reconstructs this little known World War II history.
- Orthodox Jews, Jewish atheists, Russian immigrants, and kibbutzniks discuss their views on "who is a Jew."
- This film traces the story of the German-Jewish Auerbach family of Oppingen, Germany, from 1933 through 1945. The film begins with home movies in the 1930s and follows Inge Auerbach from her hometown to her deportation to Theresienstadt, where she suffered for 3 1/2 years and was among the 100 children who survived. Rare footage is accompanied by on-camera interviews of Inge and her mother on a return visit to their town, and to Theresienstadt, where an amazing amount of photographs and documents were saved. Interviews with former Nazi Party members, townspeople, and the switchboard operator from Theresienstadt are conducted by German high school students and exposes German citizens who attempt to deny and conceal their involvement in the Holocaust.
- This documentary examines the 1948 episode of the Altalena, a ship whose fate nearly incited civil war in the newly-established State of Israel. Immediately after Israel attained statehood, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion established a national army into which several independent Jewish defense forces, small armies with their own political philosophies, were supposed to unite. However, on June 20, 1948, the Altalena arrived off Israel carrying 930 World War II refugees and a stockpile of ammunition amassed by the Irgun (one of the independent defense forces) in direct violation of Ben Gurion's new military chain-of-command. In the midst of the ship's landing and a cease-fire in the War of Independence, Ben Gurion gave the order to shell the ship, forcing Jews to fire on Jews and almost sparking a civil war. The late Yitzhak Rabin was one of the participants in this event and is interviewed here along with many other eye witnesses. The controversy surrounding the Altalena affair continues to reverberate in current Israeli politics.
- Nat Silver has been engaged 7 times already. This time, his 8th, he's really going to get married. But a visitor shows up, Shirley's old boyfriend. With a gun ! He'll kill himself unless he can have Shirley back, and Nat graciously gives in. According to Nat's mother, his Uncle Shya was unlucky at love but lucky as a matchmaker, and Nat is just like Shya. Nat tells his family he's going to Italy. But he remains in New York and sets himself up with a new name and new business, Nat Gold, Advisor in Human Relations...
- In 1941, a group of the Soviet Union's most prominent Jewish writers and artists, including Solomon Mikhoels, Peretz Markish, and Sergei Eisenstein, signed an appeal to Jews throughout the world, asking them to join the Soviet people in fighting against fascism.
- Angst looks at the lives of three Jewish comedians--Deb Filler, Sandy Gutman, and Moshe Waldoks--whose parents are concentration camp survivors.
- Imagination, memories, and fiction combine in this film about the life and world of renowned Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. The film joins the author on his daily pilgrimages to the Jerusalem Cafe, Anna Ticho House.
- Four young men, all commanders in the same Israeli Defense Force Golan Heights paratrooper unit, were killed over a 22-month period from 1995 to 1997. Their families, realizing they all suffer a common fate, agree to meet and share their stories. With great sensitivity and skill, director Ayelet Bargur, whose brother Zvi was among those who died, documents the ongoing attempts by these families to come to terms with the deaths of their loved ones. This painful subject is one that touches many Israeli families today. Also directed by Ayelet Bargur: As if Nothing Happened.
- This Soviet Army film of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp was awarded the Red Banner in 1945. It contains dramatic footage of the survivors and some of the atrocities perpetrated in this most notorious of camps.
- This documentary celebrates the pioneering labors of early Jewish settlers in Palestine, recording the technological and agricultural accomplishments of the pioneers and the idea of a socialist Jewish state.
- Aya is a woman who, since early childhood, has been driven by her father's ambition to see her become successful. Now she is shooting a film and fragments of dreams ad fantasy alternate with reality.
- This film skillfully incorporates rare archival footage shot in 1937 by an American born in Gombin (75 miles northwest of Warsaw) with contemporary scenes to tell the story of 50 children of Holocaust survivors who return to their parents' village in Poland. They make friends, unexpectedly, with some of their parents' former neighbors and together they pay homage to their ancestors in this town where Jews and Christians lived together for centuries. We join them at the rededication of the Jewish cemetery, restoring tombstones desecrated and used as road paving; at the placement of a monument to the Jewish victims at Chelmno, the first extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and at the Konin slave labor camp's mass grave, where the filmmaker's grandfather is buried. This moving film makes a strong statement about the continuity of life and the need of subsequent generations to remember.
- Where does one find the meaning of life? Perhaps in the kitchen of Iraqi-born sculptor Helene Simon, where she discusses her life and shows us how to make her famous Baklava.
- Born near Kiev in 1882, Yakov Ben Dov came to Jerusalem from the Ukraine in 1907 with little more than a still camera to his name. He became one of the most accomplished photographers and filmmakers of his time.
- The seamy Jewish underworld of Odessa is the setting for Isaac Babel's story based on the life of gangster king Mishka Yaponchik "Mike the Jap" Vinnitsky. Murder is a way of life for Benya and his gang until he finds himself ensnared in a Bolshevik trap.
- Bitter Herbs and Honey tells a richly textured story of the making of multi-cultural Australia. Through the saga of the the story of the Jewish migrants, mainly from Eastern Europe, who made their first home in Melbourne's inner-city suburb of Carlton, the film explores issues at the heart of Australia's development towards cultural diversity. The film builds a picture of poor immigrants who left Europe in the period of turmoil preceding, and in the wake of, the Second World War, having lost everything spiritually and materially. In a country most had never heard of on the other side of the earth, they began to rebuild their lives. Refusing to join the cultural melting pot, the Carlton Jews chose instead to keep their own language, religion, culture and traditions alive, whilst integrating into their adopted country.There was conflict and struggle between the new Eastern European arrivals, with their visible Jewish identity, and the established German/Anglo-Jewish community that had lived in the affluent suburbs south of the Yarra for generations and saw itself primarily as British, then Australian, and lastly as Jewish. Bitter Herbs and Honey is a story of struggle between the old and the new, the powerful and the weak, identity and assimilation. This struggle continued until the sheer strength of numbers of the new arrivals broke down the barriers between the two groups and the inevitable process of integration occurred.
- Over the last 50 years, millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust have claimed and obtained monetary compensation for the persecution, enslavement, and dispossession as well as the restitution of confiscated property. The German government has already paid out over 100 billion marks, and although more than 90% of all Holocaust survivors have now died, new claims continue to surface.
- This historic document of Palestine during the tumultuous 1920s includes footage from three rare films by Ya'akov Ben Dov, the father of Hebrew cinema. Preserved in a joint project by the National Center for Jewish Film and the Israel Film Archive, these works include Return to Zion (1920-21), The Rebirth of a Nation (1923), and Romance of Palestine (1926). Considered lost for more than 70 years, the films depict the early builders of the Zionist vision who pioneered the Third Aliyah and the Fourth Aliyah and contain images of settlements and activities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Rishon le Zion and Old Jaffa. From this rare archival footage, director and scholar Ya'akov Gross has created a vital and accessible look at a formative period in Israeli history whose legacy continues to influence Israeli politics today.
- In the small Montreal municipality of Outremont, two very different communities live side by side: Hassidic Jews and their French-Catholic neighbors. This award-winning film examines the complex dynamics involved in this clash of cultures.
- This penetrating documentary produced for Israeli television looks at the lives of three Jewish women writers: Cordelia Edvardson, Angelika Schrobsdorff, and Inge Deutschkron. All three grew up in pre-war Berlin, until Nazi racial laws shattered their lives. Uprooted and cut off from family and friends, all three women made their way to Israel, where they became accomplished journalists and authors. The film follows the unique paths taken by each of these women in her quest for identity and the meaning of life in the aftermath of their dreadful wartime experiences.
- This documentary provides personal insight into the difficult situation faced by many Jews in Argentina, particularly following the bombings of the Israeli embassy and AMIA Jewish Community Center, both in Buenos Aires, in the 1990s.
- In 1940, the British government shipped thousands of refugees, most of them Jews, to P.O.W. camps in Canada and Australia. The Canadian government, while still refusing entry to Jewish refugees, realized that their prisoners were civilian refugees and not the Nazis they were expecting.
- Based on a true story, Braids tells the tale of So'ad, a 14-year-old Jewish girl imprisoned by the Iraqi government in 1947 for her participation in the Zionist movement.
- This PBS documentary tells a moving story of personal growth as the children of Holocaust survivors find the strength to confront their painful legacy and overcome the barriers of unasked and unanswered questions that separate them from their parents. As the young adults connect with their parents, the second generation discovers its own voice and grapples with the question of how to bear witness to their own children. Poignant dialogues are interwoven with commentary by Robert Jay Lifton, Helen Epstein, and Moshe Waldoks, documenting this encounter between the two generations.
- A Jewish resort hotel celebrates a pair of longtime customers' fiftieth wedding anniversary by staging an old-fashioned Borscht Belt show replete with singers, dancers, comedians and impressionists. The show concludes with a fervent musical tribute to the year-old State of Israel. Filmed on location at Young's Gap Hotel in Parksville, New York and includes glimpses of the golf course, tennis matches, calisthenics classes and sunbathers.
- Jewish life in Poland before World War II. The Vladimir Medem Sanatorium stood as the embodiment of health and enlightenment in striking contrast to the grim images of urban Polish-Jewish poverty.
- Nava, a social worker, shares the painful secret of her suffering with Jania, another woman victimized by her husband and the two form a healing bond.
- A fascinating investigation that mirrors the development of Israel itself. Shaking his own family tree in this beautifully-crafted documentary, Tal Yoffe discovers a pioneering kibbutznik filmmaker, a Czarist army officer, a Nazi-trained blacksmith, several war heroes and a much missed father.
- Many years after World War II, evidence showing a connection between Swiss policy and the deportation and murder of Charles and Sabine Sonabend's parents at Auschwitz fall into Charles's hands.
- Cohen is a sergeant in the Union Army and the bitter rival of another officer for the attentions of Rebecca. Like most burlesque Jewish characters of this period, this caricature borders on anti-Semitism. Yet Cohen is also the hero of the film.
- Trying to make a call and unfamiliar with the telephone, Cohen embroils himself in a comic monologue of misunderstanding. Here, we see how the Jewish immigrant is now characterized not simply by how he moves and looks, but by how he speaks.
- Documents the little-known heroism of the Belgian Resistance who, during the Nazi occupation, hid over 4,000 Jewish children, rescuing them from deportation and extermination.
- Holocaust survivor and author Inge Deutschkron's story comes to the screen in this film chronicling 70 years of her life and career.
- Set in Kiev, Russia, on 29 September 1941, this feature chronicles the last 24 hours in the lives of a Jewish tailor and his family just prior to their deportation and execution at Babi Yar.
- All but approximately 100 Danzig Jews escaped the Nazi terror because local synagogue leaders made the unprecedented move of selling their religious artifacts and using the proceeds to finance the immigration of the entire community. In this film a group of reunited Danzig survivors identify the artifacts and explore the history of their families.
- This newsreel segment depicts the first voyage of a Polish ocean liner to Palestine in 1934, including its departure, voyage, and the urban vistas of Haifa and Tel Aviv, which greeted its arrival.
- This overview of an academic conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna Ghetto held in Vilna in 1993 includes contemporary footage juxtaposed with historical visual materials.
- Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated the Nazi extermination camps: the survivors, the conditions, and the evidence of mass murder. The film includes accounts of the economic aspects of the camps' operation, the interrogation of captured camp personnel, and the enforced visits of the inhabitants of neighboring towns, who, along with the rest of their compatriots, are blamed for complicity in the Nazi crimes - one of the few such condemnations in the Allied war records.
- Between 1941 and 1944, at least one quarter of a million people were murdered in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. Between 1975 and 1981, the longest trial in German legal history took place in Düsseldorf. Fifteen men and women, former camp guards, were accused of having participated in the murder of thousands. Director Fechner worked eight years to complete this three-part film, which is composed of interviews with defendants, witnesses, judges, prosecutors, defense councils, historians, criminals, and victims. Filming was not permitted during the 474 days of the six-year trial, so Fechner had to reconstruct the trial. The film is a kind of "counter" trial and an interpretation of the original proceedings. The accused, who hardly said a word during the original trial, eagerly volunteer in front of the camera. Employing a mosaic-like technique and hard confrontational editing, Fechner allows both criminals and victims to reveal themselves. See also: Majdanek 1944
- Thousands of Jewish children lived in the Polish city of Bendzin before the Holocaust. Barely a dozen survived the community's destruction. Through interviews and rare archival film and photos, this critically-acclaimed documentary tells the story of three of these children-Ada, Shulamit, and the filmmaker herself, Mira. These women recount their memories of a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis and reflect on the courage of those individuals and families who helped them survive. The film thus not only documents a tragic historical period but also examines the complexity of human nature, undermining stereotypes about the behavior of Jews, Poles, and even some Germans during the era. The film's story involves Alfred Rossner, a German businessman who, like Oskar Schindler, employed forced Jewish labor and saved Jewish lives, but who, unlike Schindler, was not a Nazi Party member and paid with his life for his actions.
- This feature film is set in the small Swabian village of Nesselbühl, Germany, in April 1945, shortly before the end of the war. The roaring guns of the approaching American troops can be heard in the distance and only Anna, daughter of an innkeeper and leader of the German Girls Society (BDM), still believes that hope can be found in trusting the Führer. But then, overnight, a train arrives at the village station bringing a horror nobody is prepared for: three cattle cars of Jewish concentration camp prisoners being moved to a new camp farther away from Allied Forces. The dying prisoners stay on the tracks for three days, strangers no one wants to be responsible for. Strangely enough, life goes on as usual in Nesselbühl. Only for young Anna will nothing be as it was again.
- Based on a novel by Lilly Perry Amitai, Blind Man's Bluff takes a bittersweet look at the life of a young Israeli woman. Trying to distance herself from her Holocaust survivor parents and ex-boyfriend, pianist Micki Stav moves out of her parents' house in search of her own identity. She moves into a small apartment but remains caught in a lattice of demanding relationships. Tension increases as Micki tries to succeed in the classical music world. Her eclectic new neighbors, though, introduce her to a new world of desires in which Micki finds the courage to confront her problems and emerge as an independent and mature woman.
- In October 1936, a high official in the Austrian government receives a letter from a German Jewish woman with whom he had an affair in 1925 asking him to help place an 11-year-old, half Jewish boy in a good Austrian school. Is the child his? Should he help? And above all should he help now, at a time when Nazis are becoming powerful in Austria?
- The matrux is a unique form of Moroccan-Jewish music, fusing Hebrew and Arabic texts. The music and lyrics are derived from Andalusian traditions of music and poetry, reflecting the centuries-old link between Jewish and Muslim societies.