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Virtual program: Searching for Sousa Mendes
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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Virtual program: Women of Valor — Stories of Resistance in Paris
4 PM US EASTERN TIME, 1 PM US PACIFIC TIME
In February 1943, at the height of the deportations from France, a daring group of Jewish and Christian women banded together to stage the largest single rescue operation in wartime Paris. Please join Anne Nelson, author of Suzanne’s Children, and Joanne Gilbert, author of Women of Valor, as they describe these women — including Suzanne Spaak, Sophie Schwartz, Frida Wattenberg and others — who risked everything to fight back against evil.
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Virtual program: Fiddler – A Miracle of Miracles!
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!
The Jewish James Bond and Other Heroes
Go behind the scenes and get to know some of the colorful characters who participated in Operation Zebra — the 1947-49 mission to help rescue newborn Israel’s 600,000 Jews and provide a safe haven for Holocaust survivors. The heroes include the Jewish James Bond, Yehuda Arazi, the operation’s whimsical chief pilot, Sam Lewis, and its cowgirl flight instructor, Elynor Rudnick. Meet Arazi’s grandson and namesake, and Lewis’ daughter, who was a teenager during the operation, as well as Boaz Dvir, who captured their tales in the 2015 award-winning PBS documentary A Wing and a Prayer and the 2020 critically acclaimed book Saving Israel. (more…)
Broken Branches — Youth Aliyah and the Rescue of Jewish Teenagers
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
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…)
Escape to Ecuador — a Jewish Safe Haven
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…)
Woman of Valor — The Story of Hannah Senesh
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…)
In My Mother’s Footsteps
Caught within the ever-approaching steel jaws of Nazi exterminators, 19-year-old Leah Steppel from Dusseldorf successfully escapes Europe via Portugal — thanks to a precious visa from Aristides de Sousa Mendes. More than seven decades later, her daughter Rebecca Barber retraces Leah’s footsteps to freedom. (more…)
Resistance of the Heart – A Valentine’s Day Program
The Rosenstrasse Protest is the nearly-forgotten story of a group of women in Berlin who faced down the Third Reich — and won! In February of 1943, several hundred non-Jewish wives of Jewish men faced down Hitler’s genocidal policy and the SS to secure the release of their captured husbands. Nathan Stoltzfus is the world’s expert on this history, and he will be in dialogue with historian Mordecai Paldiel as well as Ruth Wiseman, whose family lived this story. (more…)