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- Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders.
- A gripping documentary about the courage and determination of a young English stockbroker who saved the lives of 669 children. Between March 13 and August 2, 1939, Nicholas Winton organized 8 transports to take children from Prague to new homes in Great Britain, and kept quiet about it until his wife discovered a scrapbook documenting his unique mission in 1988. Winton was a successful 29-year-old stockbroker in London who "had an intuition" about the fate of the Jews when he visited Prague in 1939. He quietly but decisively got down to the business of saving lives. We learn how only two countries, Sweden and Britain, answered his call to harbor the young refugees; how documents had to be forged and how once foster parents signed for the children on delivery, that was the last he saw of them.
- The mystical love story between Chonen, a poor Talmud student, and Lea, a girl from a wealthy family, depicts the traditional folk culture of Polish Jews before WW2.
- Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated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.
- This chilling, vitally important documentary was produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The film contains unedited, previously unavailable film footage of Auschwitz shot by the Soviet military forces between January 27 and February 28, 1945 and includes an interview with Alexander Voronsov, the cameraman who shot the footage. The horrifying images include: survivors; camp visit by Soviet investigation commission; criminal experiments; forced laborers; evacuation of ill and weak prisoners with the aid of Russian and Polish volunteers; aerial photos of the IG Farben Works in Monowitz; and pictures of local people cleaning up the camp under Soviet supervision.
- Mothers of Today includes the sole motion picture performance of radio star Esther Field, who was well known on the airwaves of the 1930s as the 'Yiddishe Mama.' The film exemplifies the Yiddish film genre of shund, a brand of popular entertainment which appealed to working-class Jewish-American immigrant audiences with broadly-drawn, sentimental stories that reflected the daily life and culture of a distinctively American Yiddish community. While the shund films were invariably low-budget (and low-brow) affairs, these humble productions formed an important part of life in the United States for their audience. For actresses such as Field or Celia Adler (star of Where is My Child?, also directed by Lynn in 1939), shund offered one of the few opportunities to play strong leading roles. In retrospect, Mothers of Today is an important cultural artifact expressing the anxieties of Jewish immigrant families faced with the younger generation's increasing assimilation into mainstream American society. Shund often dealt with the plight of the Jewish mother, recognizing the important role women played in Jewish family life during the difficult period of immigration. Such is the case with Mothers of Today, in which Field plays a mother coping with her children's troubles resulting from their straying from Jewish tradition. In one subplot, a cantor's son led astray by a woman of "questionable morality" becomes involved with gangsters and ends up stealing the deed to his mother's store. On March 14, 1939, Film Daily reviewed Mothers of Today as follows: "Heavy tragedy, which seems to be an essential basis of all Yiddish dramas, is done to a turn in this new film and it should please the dyed in the wool Yiddish fans. Produced on a small budget with a hurried shooting schedule, the film has considerable merit. Cast members, with the exception of the talented Esther Field, were recruited from the stage for their initial appearance on the screen, and they give Miss Field adequate support. Henry Lynn directs the film feelingly. The story deals with the tragedies which beset Miss Field as her children get in trouble."
- Adapted from Yoram Kaniuk's best-selling novel, this heart-rending love story unfolds during the siege of Jerusalem in 1948. A young and beautiful volunteer nurse is drawn to the enigmatic Himmo, a mortally wounded and mutilated soldier who cannot speak or move.
- 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.
- Nazi propaganda film depicting the notorious Theresienstadt concentration camp as a sort of idyllic rest stop, in an attempt to convince world opinion that there was no such thing as Nazi death camps.
- The summerly adventures of Kurt (Tucholsky) and girl friend staying in a Swedish castle whilst the political changes in Germany in the thirties.
- Jewish Luck revolves around Menakhem Mendl (one of Sholem Aleichem's characters), a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Despite Jewish oppression in Tsarist Russia, Mendl continues to pursue his dreams and his continued persistence transforms him from schlemiel to hero.
- The deportation of 4000 Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz in July 1944, as told by George Tabori, and how the narrator's mother escaped it, owing to coincidence, courage and some help from where you'd least expect it.
- The film presents the little-known story of the 20,000 European Jews who fled to Shanghai between late 1937 and 1941. After 1939, Shanghai was the last and only resort to find safe haven from the Nazis, though not that safe either, as the film shows. This was due to Shanghai's status as a free port not requiring entry papers, and the relative tolerance of the Japanese occupiers, who, far from being saviors, resisted their Grand Ally's (Germany) demand to exterminate the Jews, and even prevented the actions of the Nazi "Butcher of Warsaw" who was assigned to liquidate the Shanghai Jews. After the Communist takeover of China, all traces of the Jews' existence, including a Jewish cemetery with 2,000 graves, were razed. The Jews passage through Shanghai is revealed, and preserved through four survivors (Fred Fields now of Miami, Ernest and Illo Heppner, and Siegmar Simon), and an incredible collage of rare film footage assembled by Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy who wrote, edited, directed and produced the documentary.
- A good-natured but incorrigible layabout becomes embroiled in a plot to rob the Israeli lottery, all the while indulging in his boundless zeal for mischief and romance.
- A Hollywood adaptation of the short stories of Anzia Yazierska, the first writer to bring stories of American Jewish women to a mainstream audience, Hungry Hearts focuses on the hopes and hardships of the Levin family, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living on New York City's Lower East Side.
- In 1941, nearly 800 Romanian Jewish refugees, packed like sardines aboard the Struma, a 46-meter boat bound for Palestine, found themselves stranded when the boat's engine failed. Limping along the Struma manages to reach Istanbul Harbor, where it waits while Turkey, trying to stay "neutral" in the war, deliberates the passengers' fate. Britain, enforcing its policy of limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, puts heavy pressure on the Turks not to let the ship pass through their territorial waters. On 23 February 1942 the Turks tow the disabled Struma out into the Black Sea. 12 hours later a Russian submarine locks on the boat and a single torpedo is fired. 24 hours later, Turkish fishermen go out to the site and find only one survivor. In 2000, using information provided by the sole survivor and the grandson of two Struma passengers, an international team of elite divers to find the watery grave of the Struma passengers. Immediately, a Turkish dive club claims to have found the wreck and with Turkish government support, attempts to obstruct the search for the Struma. Suddenly, contemporary politics mirror events of the early 1940's and the divers find themselves entangled in a 60-year-old cover-up.
- Mamele embraces the entire gamut of interwar Jewish life in Lodz - tenements and unemployed Jews, nightclubs and gangsters, religious Jews celebrating Sukkot - but the film belongs to Molly Picon who romps undaunted through her dutiful daughter role saving siblings, keeping the family intact, singing and acting her way through the stages of a woman's life from childhood to old age.
- Leo is a holocaust survivor who suffers from total amnesia; he comes to the U.S. and works as a hotel desk clerk. One night while a comedian, who owns a bar in the hotel, gives him a drink, he breaks out in song and discovers a great voice. Under a psychiatrist's treatment, and because of a blow to the head by some hoodlums, he realizes his name is David and that he was the son of a great Jewish Cantor, and gradually recovers his memory of losing his parents. He gives up a promising career singing in nightclubs to return to the synagogue.
- Paul Mazursky journeys to a small town in Ukraine to witness and participate in a three-day celebration by over 25,000 singing, dancing, praying, and emotionally elevated Chassidic Jews.
- Moishe Oysher gives his most robust performance as a passionate shtetl blacksmith who must struggle against temptation to become a mensch. Ulmer's film is a musical version of David Pinski's classic 1906 play Yankl der Schmid.
- This musical drama marks the screen debut of Moishe Oysher, in a film critic J. Hoberman calls an "anti-Jazz Singer." Oysher stars as a wayward youth who makes his way from his Polish shtetl to New York's Lower East Side where he is "discovered" and becomes a well-known singer. Ultimately, he returns home to the Old Country and reunites with his parents and his childhood sweetheart.
- This film tells the story of the men and women who formed the Jewish partisan movement in Vilna, Lithuania, during World War II.
- 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
- The Buchenwald Ball is a film that celebrates survival. Uplifting, full of swagger and joie de vivre, it tells the story of 45 orphans who escaped the Holocaust and found their way to Australia after their liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp. These child survivors came to be known as the Buchenwald Boys, a group of friends who drink hard, argue with gusto, sustain one another, and dance to live. The film documents their struggles, their humor, and ultimately the tenacity of their human spirits in the aftermath of unimaginable tragedy. Whether they are debating how to celebrate the 60th ball or the existence for God, the Boys are full of vigor and humor. Four of the Boys-Szaja Chaskiel, Sam Michalowicz, Henry Salter, and Joe Szwarcberg-now in their seventies and eighties, share stories from before and after their liberation, revealing memories of childhood homes, the last moments with murdered parents, surviving Nazi ghettos, camps and death marches, and their emigration to Australia. The film follows Chaskiel on his first visit to Poland and Germany since his liberation. Accompanied by his son, Mark, Chaskiel visits the camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald, where he visits Block 66, the children's block, where he and most of the Boys were imprisoned. Every year on April 11, the anniversary of their liberation, the Buchenwald Boys hold a ball filled with music, dancing, and an energy that defies their advancing ages. The ball is a defiant celebration of life, friendship, family, and love.
- This period drama set in 18th century Volhynia stars Maurice Schwartz as Leybke, a handsome Jewish guardsman who, in the end, martyrs himself and saves his brethren.
- The last Yiddish feature made in Poland before WWII, this 1939 film was based on a 1907 play by the prolific playwright Jacob Gordin. Best known for his folksy didacticism and moralism, Gordin brought the common life of the Lower East Side to the Yiddish stage. With over 100 plays to his credit, Gordin was a formative influence on modern Yiddish theater. He was so popular among theatergoers that reportedly a quarter of a million people attended his funeral in New York City. Without a Home is the story of the separation and hardships faced by immigrants in America at the turn of the century. Its touching portrayal of the hardships of immigrant life enthralled Jewish theater audiences and it became part of the standard Yiddish stage repertoire in America and Poland. The film provides a poignant and dramatic picture of a difficult era, focusing on the bleak prospects for the survival of traditional Jewish family values. When the eldest son of the Rivkin family is drowned, the father leaves his family in Europe to go to America. There he finds only financial hardship and loneliness, struggling to find a way to bring the rest of his family over. The stellar cast includes stage actress Ida Kaminska and the hilarious comedy duo, Dzigan and Shumacher, who provide a healthy measure of comic relief. The title, Without a Home, intended by Gordin to symbolize the uprooted Jewish immigrant family and by extension, the Jewish people, was a particularly poignant one for Jewish film audiences in Poland on the eve of WWII. The film underscored the growing sense among Polish Jews facing the Nazi threat and increasing antisemitism in Poland that they too might soon be "without a home."
- 19821h 49m7.6 (154)TV MovieAfter his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port.
- Interweaving docu-drama sequences with archival material, this film follows Israel and Frania Rubinek on their emotional return journey to Poland to reunite with the woman who, with her husband and son, saved their lives 40 years earlier.
- Motl, a poor laborer, loving husband and new father, leads cloakmakers in a strike for better working conditions. When he is severely injured by strikebreakers, his wife, Esther, and infant son are left destitute. Desperate to save her starving child, Esther gives him up for adoption to a wealthy couple, and then commits suicide.
- Beckermann's parents met in Vienna after the Holocaust. Tracing the migratory paths of her family before World War II, Beckerman returns to the European Jewish communities which inspired her childhood stories.
- The two sons of a poor Russian-Jewish pushcart peddler on New York's Lower East Side are causing their father grief. As Morris and Sammy stray from traditions cherished by their parents, each generation learns to accept change to preserve the family as a source of love and respect.
- Ulmer's soulful, open-air adaptation of Peretz Hirshbein's classic play heralded the Golden Age of Yiddish cinema. When an ascetic young scholar ventures into the countryside, searching for the city of "true Jews," he learns some unexpected lessons from the Jewish peasants who take him in as a tutor for their children.
- This early postwar suspense story, based on a well-known 1926 murder trial with Dreyfus-like overtones also represents an East German reflection on Nazism. Dr. Blum, a Jewish manufacturer living in Germany, is falsely accused of killing his booker. Even when the real killer's identity becomes evident, the state prosecutor refuses to accept Blum's innocence. The film explores German reaction to the trial and investigates the relationship between the legal system, antisemitism, and fascism, providing insight into the historical context that allowed Nazism to flourish.
- 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.
- Isabella Rossellini narrates this memoir of the Sephardic Jewish population in North African prior to WWII.
- Seventy years after the 1929 Hebron massacre, directors Noit and Dan Geva bring us the personal testimony of 12 people who survived the atrocity. Noit Geva's grandmother, who was only 16 years old at the time of the massacre, was so traumatized by the event that she never spoke of her experience, but recorded what she witnessed in a journal entry entitled "What I Saw in Hebron." This gripping documentary allows a rare glimpse into a little-known moment in Israel's history.
- Portraying Zionist settlers' accomplishments, this part-documentary, part-travelogue shows 1930s Palestine as opportunity for fulfilling a dream. Through evocative visuals, it encourages settlement and investment in the "Jewish homeland."
- 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.
- 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.
- This film visits the Los Angeles community of "Rhodeslis"--Jews who lived on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes from 1492 to World War II--who have passed down their traditions, food, songs, rituals, and their medieval Ladino Spanish dialect to their American-born descendants.
- 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.
- 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.
- Cohen takes an elliptical approach in telling the story of Pinchas Rutenberg, a visionary, complex, and larger-than-life figure, who, amongst other things, brought electricity to Jewish Palestine in the early 20th century by building a hydroelectric power station in Nahararyim.
- This documentary is the film record of one of the first Nazi war crimes trials, which was conducted while the war was still raging. Majdanek, a concentration and extermination camp located near Lublin, Poland, was erected in 1941 and liberated in July 1944. When the Soviet and Polish troops drove the Nazis out of the region, they uncovered the evidence of Nazi genocide. One month later, a joint Soviet-Polish commission heard evidence from survivors and witnesses of the atrocities that took place at Majdanek. Their testimony is preserved in this film. Bengt and Irmgard von zur Muhlen are German film archivists who unearthed a wealth of material in various Eastern bloc archives. Majdanek 1944 includes documentary material made available for the first time in the West.
- A jewish cantor is seduced by the allure of opera when introduced to it by two attractive young Poles.
- A lyrical, sweeping history of Jewish life in Poland, depicting the richness of Jewish culture both religious and secular: the shtetl and the city dwellers of Bialystok, Cracow, Vilna and Warsaw; the contributions of Jews to the whole of Polish life; and the extreme economic and political vicissitudes to which Polish Jewry was subject over a thousand-year period. The Last Chapter is the destruction of Polish Jewry by the Nazi onslaught, depicted here with sensitivity and high drama. The film includes rare footage of Jewish life in early 20th century Poland.
- Journey into Life follows the struggles of three concentration camp survivors--Yehuda Bacon is Israel, Gerhard Durlacher of The Netherlands, and Ruth Kluger of the United States--in rebuilding their lives after World War II.
- Make sure there's a hanky nearby: After the death of their mother, older sister Betty works tirelessly, supporting her sister through nursing school and her fiancée through medical school only to see her happiness shattered when her sister and fiancée fall in love.
- 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.
- 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.