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…)

Eva Zelig‘s documentary An Unknown Country tells the story of European Jews who fled Nazi persecution to find refuge in an unlikely destination: Ecuador. This small South American country, barely known at the time, took them in when most had closed their doors. Featuring first hand accounts, family photos and archival material, the film opens a window on the exiles’ perilous escape and difficult adjustment as they remade their lives in what was for them an exotic, unfamiliar land. (more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK • 9 PM JERUSALEM

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There are few figures in world history like Hannah Senesh. Possessed at a young age by the mission to save the Jewish people, she was an ardent Zionist who moved to Palestine to help establish a Jewish homeland. Then, in the midst of the Nazi genocide in Europe she volunteered to parachute into Yugoslavia en route to Hungary in an effort to warn and rescue Hungary’s Jews. Today she is remembered and revered in Israel — the land she helped build. Her poem “Eli, Eli” was set to music, and is widely known. This program will include a screening of Roberta Grossman‘s Blessed is the Match about Hannah’s life and action. Then meet the filmmaker who will be in dialogue with historians Dr. Michael Berenbaum and Dr. Mordecai Paldiel. Also joining the program will be the Israeli pop singer Avaya to speak about what Hannah Senesh means to her. A story everyone should know! (more…)

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

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Billionaire activist George Soros is one of the most influential and controversial figures of our time. Famous for betting against the Bank of England in 1992 and making a billion dollars in one day, he is maligned by ideologues on both the left and the right for daring to tackle the world’s problems and putting his money behind his fight – from free elections and freedom of the press to civil rights for minorities. With unprecedented access to the man and his inner circle, filmmaker Jesse Dylan, the son of music icon Bob Dylan, follows Soros across the globe and pulls back the curtain on his personal history, private wealth, and public activism. The resulting filmed portrait reveals a complicated genius whose experience as a Jew during the Holocaust gave rise to a lifelong crusade against authoritarianism and hate. (more…)

In 1940, a ship called the S.S. Quanza left the port of Lisbon carrying several hundred Jewish refugees to freedom. Most of them held life-saving visas issued by the Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. But events went terribly wrong, and the passengers became trapped on the ship when no country would accept them. Nobody Wants Us tells the gripping true story of how Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in to save the passengers on board. Other heroes of the Quanza were the lawyers Jacob and Sallie Morewitz and members of the National Council of Jewish Women. This is an episode in American history that everyone should know!
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