The Paper Brigade — Cultural Resistance in Vilna

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK

This film-and-discussion program tells the story of the cultural resistance group in Vilna known as “The Paper Brigade.” Led by the famed Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, they risked their lives to rescue the cultural and literary heritage of the Jewish community in the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.”

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VIEW THE TRAILER

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THE SCHEDULE

⇒ October 25-28, watch the film The Paper Brigade on your home device. A link will be provided to all who register.

⇒ Sunday, October 27 at 2:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, tune into the program with our distinguished panel of speakers. A link will be provided to all who register.

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MEET THE SPEAKERS

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Hadas Kalderon (right) is an Israeli theater, television and film actress, a screenwriter and producer, and she appears in the film, The Paper Brigade. She is the granddaughter of the famed Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who was the leading figure in this cultural resistance network. She studied acting in Moscow with Anatoly Vasiliev. When she returned to Israel, she joined Rina Yerushalmi’s Itim Ensemble. Among her many roles is Clytemnestra in the Mythos project and Stella in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire at the Beit Lessin Theater. In 2009, she won the Rosenblum Award for Excellence from the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality.

Elisabeth Gallas (left) is the author of A Mortuary of Books. The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust,  published in 2019 and winner of a National Jewish Book Award. She is Deputy Director of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, Germany. She received her Ph.D in Modern History from the Universität Leipzig in 2011. She was a Research Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute of Holocaust Studies, and held a Minerva Research Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Recently she was a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on Modern Jewish Legal and Cultural History, the Holocaust and Aftermath Studies. 

Jonathan Brent is a historian, publisher, translator, writer, and teacher. In 2009, he became Executive Director and CEO of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he initiated The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collection Project, an international project to conserve and digitize all of YIVO’s pre-World War II collections in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania. In 2018, he initiated the development of the YIVO Digital Museum of East European and Russian Jewish Life. In 2019 he received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania by the President of the Republic of Lithuania in recognition of his work in promoting cooperation between Lithuania and YIVO and for the preservation of the prewar Jewish archives of Lithuania.

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Registration for this program is closed.

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This program is co-sponsored by