Aviva Kempner’s Rosenwald tells the inspiring true story of Julius Rosenwald, the President of Sears, who was a Jewish hero of African-American history. Rosenwald, imbued with the value of tikkun olam, saw parallels between the brutal persecutions of Jews in Eastern Europe and African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, and he could not stand idly by. His grandest project was to build more than 5,300 rural schools to educate black children in partnership with Booker T. Washington. Several generations of leaders, thinkers and scholars were Rosenwald school graduates, including such luminaries as the late Maya Angelou, the late Rep. John Lewis, and Eugene Robinson — all of whom appear in the film. (more…)

An unsung hero who should be widely known! In Berlin in the 1930’s, the civil rights of Jews were systematically stripped away. A young rabbi refused to be silent. His name was Joachim Prinz and he set out to restore the self-esteem of the German Jews. Expelled from Germany in 1937, Prinz arrived in the United States, where he witnessed racism against African Americans and realized that the American ideal was not a reality. Prinz became a leader of the civil rights movement and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, declaring, “Bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”  (more…)

An American hero you never learned about in school! This film tells the remarkable yet little known story of Al Schwimmer, a TWA flight engineer who assembled a group of American pilots and others to rescue the newborn state of Israel. They succeeded in their secret and daring mission but were tried and convicted by the US government.  “Al Schwimmer is the greatest gift America gave Israel.” – David Ben-Gurion (more…)

LOS ANGELES, 11 AM • NEW YORK, 2 PM

PARIS, 8 PM • JERUSALEM, 9 PM

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Not to be missed! Join us for a remarkable true story told by French-Israeli filmmaker Yonathan Levy in Das Kind, winner of Best Film at the European Independent Film Festival in Paris. Irma Miko, a concert pianist born in Czernowitz, joined the French Resistance in Paris in 1941. Her impossibly dangerous mission was to convert occupying German soldiers to the cause of the French Resistance. She narrates her history to her son, André Miko, as the two of them visit places from her past. Then we witness her reunion with one of the Nazi soldiers whom she had successfully transformed into a Resistance fighter during the war. Levy’s cinematically creative approach to storytelling, which includes photo projections and theatrical set pieces performed by Irma’s granddaughter Sarah Miko, brings to life one woman’s heroic struggle.  (more…)

In June 1940, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, France, issued life-saving visas to thousands of Holocaust refugees in defiance of his government’s direct orders – an action for which he paid a heavy personal price. In June 2013, filmmaker Semyon Pinkhasov followed a group of visa recipient families, along with members of the Sousa Mendes family, as they embarked on the Sousa Mendes Foundation’s Journey on the Road to Freedom, retracing their families’ footsteps. They were “searching for Sousa Mendes” – looking for traces and clues of a lost history in an effort to understand their personal pasts.
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Meet our panel of Fiddler superstars! Join us for a Chanukah program celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. Steven Skybell is the award-winning Tevye of the Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish production that recently took New York by storm, with musical direction by Zalmen Mlotek. Samantha Massell played Hodel in the recent Broadway revival, and Mimi Turque performed in the original Broadway cast. We will watch Max Lewkowicz‘s dazzling Fiddler – A Miracle of Miracles produced by Patricia Kenner and then spend an uplifting hour together.  Lechaim!

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A beautiful and touching film! This program will present the Youth Aliyah movement of the 1930s and its rescue of thousands of Jewish teenagers from Germany and Poland who would otherwise have been trapped by the Nazis. One of the leaders of this movement was the American-born Henrietta Szold, who was also the founder of Hadassah. We will watch a short documentary film, Broken Branches, about Michla Gelfand, a Polish girl of fourteen who was saved in this way. The film is gorgeous, with a mixture of animation and live action, and this is a rescue operation that is not widely known.  Not to be missed!  (more…)

Return to Calais is a short documentary film linking refugees past and present. In 1940, Paulette Szafran was a Belgian-Jewish teenager who fled the Nazi invasion of Brussels. She crossed into France and arrived as far as Calais, where her family found temporary shelter during the catastrophic bombing. After the siege of Calais, the family was compelled to return to Belgium, where Paulette spent the war years in hiding. In 2018, after Paulette died, her daughter Edith Goldenhar embarked on a journey to retrace her mother’s exodus using her vivid wartime diary as a guide. In Calais, she met with today’s refugees and with Care4Calais volunteers, showing how empathy connects the dots of displacement across geography and generations.  (more…)