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- A documentary on Steven Spielberg, filmmaker. Includes interviews with relatives, film critics, peers and people who have worked with him.
- A slapstick comedy lampooning bureaucracy and the madness of everyday life in Israel centers on an escaped lunatic who digs up the streets of Tel-Aviv with a drill.
- Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders.
- When a young woman investigates her town's Nazi past, the community turns against her.
- A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
- Alma Mahler's affair with the young architect Walter Gropius sets in motion a marital drama that forces her husband Gustav Mahler to seek advice from Sigmund Freud.
- 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.
- Historian Klaus Müller interviews survivors of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals because of the German Penal Code of 1871, Paragraph 175.
- Actual trial footage, emotional recollections of trial witnesses and other key participants provide insight and contrasting perspectives of the Eichmann legacy.
- 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.
- In the spring of 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus embarked on a risky and unlikely mission. Traveling into the heart of Nazi Germany, they rescued 50 Jewish children from Vienna and brought them to the United States.
- Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated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.
- Montreal 1948. On Rosh Hashanah, Chaim (a Yiddish writer) is forced to think of his religion when he's asked to be the tenth in a minyan. As he sits in the park, he suddenly sees an old friend whom he hasn't seen since they quarrelled when they were yeshiva students together. Hersh, a rabbi, survived Auschwitz and his faith was strengthened by his ordeal, while Chaim escaped the Nazis, but had lost his faith long before. The two walk together, reminisce, and argue passionately about themselves, their actions, their lives, their religion, their old quarrel, and their friendship.
- A documentary on the remarkable life of Ruth Gruber. At 97 years old, Brooklyn-born Ruth still has that same sharp intellect and moxie that propelled her to become the world's youngest PhD at age 20. At age 24, she became a New York Herald Tribune reporter and photographer and the same year was the first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic. A trusted member of the Roosevelt Administration during WWII, she was given a dangerous secret mission. A feminist before feminism, Ruth was never just an observer, she was a participant in the making of history. Ruth covered the turbulent Middle East throughout the 1940's, and the film combines verité footage of Ruth traveling back to Israel, with interviews and archival material.
- The summerly adventures of Kurt (Tucholsky) and girl friend staying in a Swedish castle whilst the political changes in Germany in the thirties.
- 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.
- The life and career of Hank Greenberg, the first major Jewish baseball star in the Major Leagues.
- One of Israel's most beloved films, this film centers around the policeman Azulai, who is as kind as he as inept.
- 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.
- 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.
- A princess must find a husband in 24 hours or forfeit her throne. She quickly marries a condemned man--but the man is pardoned.
- This film tells the story of the men and women who formed the Jewish partisan movement in Vilna, Lithuania, during World War II.
- The untold story of my great-great aunt Beate Berger, and the "Beith Ahawah Kinderheim" she founded in 1922 in Berlin for Jewish children in need. It is the story of her courageous decision, during the early 1930s, to save "her" children from Nazi Germany, and the unique rescue operation that followed. She succeeded in bringing the children to the new "Ahawah" home she built in the Haifa Bay (then Palestine). This is a film about memory, about hope and about an amazing rescue operation run by one woman who had the historical vision and understanding of the reality in 1933 Berlinthat few others had. But, most of all, it is a film about the love that was the essence of "Beith Ahawah" in Auguststarße 14-16, Berlin. Ayelet Bargur studied Art at TelAviv University and Film at Camera Obscura. Her graduation film, "A Good Place to Be" and her TV drama "As if Nothing Happened" were screened at festivals around the world and won a number of awards. Selected filmography: "As if Nothing Happened" ('99), "At the End of the Day" ('00), "Children of the Night" ('01), "Ras Pina" ('01), "So Near So Far" ('03).
- 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.
- A jewish cantor is seduced by the allure of opera when introduced to it by two attractive young Poles.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Documentary film produced for the 10th anniversary release of the film Schindler's List (1993) and the establishment of the "Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation"
- The story of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, consul to Lithuania during World War II, who defied Tokyo authorities and wrote transit visas allowing Jewish families to flee Europe to Japan and other countries.
- The ship St. Louis left Nazi Germany on May 13, 1939, with 937 German Jews bound for Cuba. Most had sold all their belongings to book passage, pay off corrupt German officials, and buy visas to Cuba. Hope turned to despair when Havana suddenly barred their entry. For thirty excruciating days, the St. Louis wandered the seas and was refused haven by every country in the Americas. Finally, they returned to Europe, where the refugees were accepted by Holland, France, Belgium, and England. Four months later, World War II began and many of the passengers died in Nazi death camps. Includes archival footage, photographs, interviews with nine survivors, and readings from the diary of the ship's captain.
- At the end of the 19th century, a woman whom everyone considers ugly is ignored by all. Eventually, she meets a French photographer, and he will be the only person capable of seeing the beauty and the richness of her intense inner world.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The story of a holocaust survivor, young teacher and psychologist, Lena Kuchler, who, at her early 30's established, single-handed, a home for surviving children from eastern Poland. Kuchler's children's house functioned both as a school and a clinic for physical and mental injuries. Her unique approach, which was inspired by Janush Korchack, was extremely progressive and highly experimental for its time, because the horrors it had to deal with had no precedent. Due to violent anti-Semitic attacks on the house, Lena had to flee with her 100 children out of Poland, with false passports and great danger. She crossed Europe with them, until they found a safe shore in France. She nursed the children to rehabilitation, until the founding of new state of Israel # where she resettled the children as citizens. In 1959 Lena Kuchler published "My Hundred Children", the first of her Best-seller books, that was translated into 14 languages. Her books had tremendous influence on the next generations. Lena's only child, Shira Toren testa, and eight of the 100 Children, reconstruct the dramatic and exiting story, in the real locations of the events.
- 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.
- 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.
- This early D.W. Griffith short shows the director's interest in Jewish ghetto life, portrayed here with sympathy and sentimentality. The melodramatic plot involves the conflict between generations in an immigrant Jewish family.
- Traveling in a vintage Cadillac, filmmaker Brian Bain, a third generation Jew from New Orleans, sets out on a 4200-mile road trip though the American South. Traveling through Delta flatlands, small towns in Mississippi, suburban subdivisions, Texas ranches, and sprawling Sunbelt metropolises what he uncovers is the unique and diverse history of Southern Jews. Along the way, Bain woos his future wife, herself a southern Jew, and discusses Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement with Andrew Young. Shalom Y'all is peopled with interesting characters, including Zelda Millstein from Natchez, a hoop-skirted tour guide at a plantation; Leo Center, a Golden Gloves boxing champion from Savannah who learned how to box by literally fighting his way to get to synagogue; Tupelo's Jack Cristil, Mississippi State's football game announcer for nearly a half-century; an African American-Jewish police chief; a kosher butcher; and musician provocateurs Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Bain discovers a vibrant regional cultural and hundreds of year of rich history in a film that is happily flavored with both its Jewish and Southern roots.
- According to Hulu's offering, this documentary (from 1966) is "a Powerful account of an astonishing slice of Holocaust history, told with poignant intimacy by the daughter of a survivor. On the eve of WWII, Jewish children boarded trains taking them to refuge in London, many never to see their parents again.
- 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.
- The story of Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, his crimes against humanity, how he escaped justice, who protects him and why.
- 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...
- The original, non-musical film version of the book which inspired "Fiddler on the Roof".
- 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."
- Written by Israel Becker, this is the first feature film to represent the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective. Shot on location at Landsberg, the largest DP camp in U.S.-occupied Germany, and mixing neorealist and expressionist styles, the film follows a Polish Jew and his family from pre-war Warsaw through Auschwitz and the DP camps.
- In this, Poland's last Yiddish feature film, comedy duo Dzigan and Shumacher play all the parts in a Sholem Aleichem story staged for an audience of children who survived the Holocaust.