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- Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders.
- A documentary on Steven Spielberg, filmmaker. Includes interviews with relatives, film critics, peers and people who have worked with him.
- When a young woman investigates her town's Nazi past, the community turns against her.
- 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.
- 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.
- Historian Klaus Müller interviews survivors of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals because of the German Penal Code of 1871, Paragraph 175.
- A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
- 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.
- 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.
- One of Israel's most beloved films, this film centers around the policeman Azulai, who is as kind as he as inept.
- Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Actual trial footage, emotional recollections of trial witnesses and other key participants provide insight and contrasting perspectives of the Eichmann legacy.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- A young woman posing as a man in a group of klezmer musicians in Poland.
- The life and career of Hank Greenberg, the first major Jewish baseball star in the Major Leagues.
- 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.
- 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"
- 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.
- 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.
- On 22 June 1941, Germany and Romania attack Soviet Russia. Several days later, Curzio Malaparte, the Italian writer who would one day pen the novel « Kaputt », a war correspondent for « Corriere de la Sera », arrives in Iasi, in the north of Moldova, on his way to the front, which is nearby. He is incapacitated by a severe allergy and his only chance of recovery is to find a Jewish doctor, an allergologist who had studied in Florence, called Josef Gruber. All his attempts to find him are unsuccessful. While looking for him, Curzio discovers that in Iasi, several days prior to his arrival, a violent anti-Semitic pogrom took place and that a large number of the Jewish citizens of Iasi were deported by train and that Dr Gruber may be among them. In order to find him, Curzio, aided by Guido Sartori, the Italian consul in Iasi, tries to obtain an official warrant to bring Josef Gruber back. He confronts indifference, rudeness and the desire by the Romanian authorities to hide something relating to the deportation of the Iasi Jews. His journeys between the garrison of Iasi and its commandant, Colonel Niculescu-Coca, and chief of police Stavarache, are fruitless. After a confrontation with Niculescu-Coca, Curzio and Sartori leave in search of the Jews who, after several nights - during which many of them were shot in the yard of the police station were boarded onto goods wagon and sent to a station 20 kilometres from Iasi. Arriving there, Curzio and Sartori find a number of locked wagons from which moans and whimpers of people in agony are heard. Wanting to open a wagon, Curzio is stopped at gunpoint by a corporal. The two learn from the corporal that the Jews who had died of thirst in the train have already been unloaded and are being buried in a nearby cemetery. Arriving there, before a mass grave where bodies covered in quicklime can be made out, Curzio learns that the man he is looking for, Josef Gruber, is among the dead. The next day, back at the hotel, Curzio receives a visit from Colonel Niculescu-Coca, who, apologizing for the previous days altercation, has some unexpected news for Curzio
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Feature documentary charting the journey of film director Dan Edelstyn as he tracks down his long lost Jewish Ukrainian heritage and then attempts to relaunch his great grandfather's once glorious vodka empire. The film constitutes a whirlwind journey through European times and spaces - the story has it all, revolution and romance, exile and entrepreneurship, and at its heart lies a life changing discovery of a vodka distillery in Ukraine.
- Getsel, a wandering Purim player, comes to a Galica village and gets a job with Reb Nuchem, the shoemaker. He falls in love with Esther, the shoemaker's daughter, but knows she is in love with a wandering circus player. However, Getzel is content in his work and dreams. Esther's father inherits a fortune and attempts to marry her to a man of his choice, but she flees with Getzel to Warsaw, where he meets and marries the circus player. Getzel returns to the village and is blamed for Esther's disappearance until she shows up and explains what happened. Getzel shoulders his pack and wanders on to another village.
- The original, non-musical film version of the book which inspired "Fiddler on the Roof".
- 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.
- Arriving in France from Israel in 1968, the Maimons join scores of other Algerian and Tunisian Jewish families in Paris' burgeoning Belleville district. Good-hearted Felix (Gad Elmaleh) reluctantly begins a life of crime to provide for his wife Mireille (Yael Abecassis) and sons, until he meets Sephardi gangster Serge (Richard Berry), from the same village as Mireille. Serge treats the Maïmons as kin, but has bigger plans for Felix's criminal career.
- 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."