American-born Naomi Zeavin goes back to her family's town of Augustow, Poland and organizes support from Solidarity and the Catholic clergy to build a memorial and hold a commemoration service for Augustow's Jews. A moving and inspiring journey showing what one woman can accomplish.
Avraham Aviel (Lipkonsky), born in 1929 in Dowgalishok, Poland. On 10 May 1942, Aviel and his family were taken together with the Jews of Radun (the village of the Rabbinic leader, the Chafetz Chaim) and the surrounding areas to be murdered in killing pits. His mother and brother Yekutiel (Koshka) were among those executed. Avraham and his brother Pinchas managed to escape. To Aviel’s great sorrow, Pinchas, who had survived the mass murder, was killed before his eyes while hiding in the Dowgalishok area. Avraham and his father found refuge with a Polish farmer, before he joined the partisans in 1943. That...
This documentary follows Nobel Peace prize winning writer-lecturer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in his roots journey. Wiesel tells here of his childhood in Sighet, and of his impressments in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Including archive footages.
In 1940, a year before the Nazis started deporting Jews to death camps, Stalin ordered the deportation of 200,000 Polish Jews from Russian-occupied eastern Poland, to forced labor settlements in the soviet interior. As cruel as Stalin’s deportations were, in the end they largely saved Polish Jewish lives, for deportees constituted the overhelming majority of Polish Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocoust. This documentary follows Asher and Shifra Scharf elderly Chasidic Polish Jews as they travel through Russia and Tajikistan revisiting their places of exile to reconstruct the events of six past decades.
Based on the book by Carl Friedman "The Shovel and the Loom", this film takes place in Antwerp, 1972, and tells of Chaja Silberschmidt, a 20-years old student who grew up in the shadow of her parents' pasts, both survived Auschwitz. Mr. Silberschmidt has become obsessed with finding the 2 suitcases full of personal effects he buried somewhere in Antwerp shortly before he was deported; for him, they've come to embody the past and everything he's lost. Mrs. Silberschmidt, meanwhile, has little patience for her husband's memories and would like to forget the Holocaust ever happened. And for her part, Chaja doesn't...
This documentary tells a moving story that connects places and times with a personal story. Menahem Daum, son of Holocaust survivors, is a Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jew who lives in New York. Menahem fears that his sons, who learn in a yeshiva in Israel, show intolerance and have extreme religious views. He takes his sons and wife Rivka on a trip to Poland in search of the Catholic peasants who hid and saved his family from the Nazis. This is also a personal search outside of religious boundaries.
Classical anti-semitic stereotypes stand out in this film showing photographs and footage shot by German soldiers meeting Polish Jews for the first time.
Based on the play by S. Ansky, this renowned Yiddish film takes place in the Polish-Russian countryside and tells a mystic love story that involves religious and cultural mores of the Jewish shtetl communities and Polish Jewry on the eve of WWII.