Film Screening

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

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Like so many children of survivors and refugees, author Victoria Redel grew up in the shadows of her parents’ different escapes from war. For a writer, such ambiguity is rich soil. Redel’s father left Europe with a visa authorized by the Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. From Lisbon he embarked on the Portuguese ship the Quanza and was among the 86 passengers retained on the ship in New York and then in Mexico to be sent back to Lisbon and then presumably to be repatriated into Nazi-occupied Belgium. The ship, after refueling with coal in Virginia, was saved by the remarkable efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in outsmarting Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The Border of Truth is a fictionalized account of this dramatic story. (more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK • 8 PM PARIS

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When the Nazis entered Paris, they stole artwork and other valuables from Jewish collectors, art dealers and ordinary families. The Jeu de Paume Museum became the main depot for the looted artwork. A young French curator named Rose Valland witnessed this massive spoliation, and she surreptitiously kept meticulous notes. Thanks to her action, thousands of these paintings were recovered after the war. She became one of the most decorated women in France but died a forgotten hero.    (more…)

11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK

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The documentary film produced by Slawomir Grunberg and co-directed with Katka Reszke tells the story of Shimon Redlich, a hidden child during the Holocaust who returns to places from his childhood in Poland and the Ukraine to thank his rescuers.

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1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

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Footsteps of My Father, an award-winning film produced by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, presents the extraordinary story of Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, the only American soldier recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

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

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Best Documentary, Toronto Jewish Film Festival

In Not Idly By, filmmaker Pierre Sauvage explores the American reaction to the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Most Americans believe that we didn’t know about the Holocaust until after it was over. Many assume that we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson! A Palestinian Jew who had come to the U.S. in 1940, this firebrand led what came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose protest campaigns helped shatter the silence surrounding the Holocaust. Prominently featured in the film are extended excerpts from the legendary 1943 production by Ben Hecht and Kurt Weill, We Will Never Die. In addition to Sauvage, our panel includes Dr. Rebecca Kook (daughter of Bergson), Dr. Rafael Medoff, and moderator Dr. Mordecai Paldiel.

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11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK

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Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of all time, was also the most famous refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe.  An anti-war firebrand, Einstein also spoke out on issues ranging from women’s rights and racism to immigration and nuclear arms control. Using a wealth of rarely-seen archival footage, correspondence, and new and illuminating interviews, filmmaker Julia Newman makes the case that Einstein’s example of social and political activism is as important today as are his brilliant, ground-breaking theories.

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12 PM LOS ANGELES • 3 PM NEW YORK

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Beginning in September of 1943, Italy became one of the prime sites for the Nazi plunder of art and cultural treasures. Follow a team of investigative art researchers from the Monuments Men Foundation as they pursue every possible lead to search for artwork and gold looted in Italy by the Nazis. Photo: A painting by Italian master Bernardo Luini stolen by the Hermann Göring Tank Division from the Abbey of Montecassino in Italy and recovered in Altaussee, Austria, 1945. Thomas Carr Howe papers, Archives of American Art.

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1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

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Stefan Ryniewicz was a Polish diplomat and counselor of the Legation of Poland in Bern, Switzerland between 1940 and 1945. He was part of the Ładoś Group that invented a scheme to save Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe by issuing them with passports to Paraguay and then convincing the Paraguayan government to accept their new citizens. Meet his granddaughter, Alexandra MacMurdo Reiter, and author K. Heidi Fishman, whose family was pulled off a transport to Auschwitz on the strength of one of these life-saving passports. Also on the panel is Holocaust historian Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, whose own family was also helped by Ryniewicz.

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1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

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1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

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This Father’s Day program pays tribute to three generations of men in the Morgenthau family — an American Jewish dynasty whose continual fight for justice has brought them to the forefront of the most dramatic events of the past hundred years. From fighting for international action against the genocide of Armenians on the cusp of WWI, through the efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust despite American political obstruction, and on to the struggle to reduce street crime and pioneer the prosecution of white collar corruption in New York City, the trajectory of the three Morgenthau generations epitomizes the American experience and the lasting value of public service.

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