Saved By Deportation
An Unknown Odyssey of Polish Jews
In August 1939, the signing of the Soviet-German Peace Treaty signaled the inevitability of the Second World War. As part of the agreement, Germany and Soviet Union invaded Poland from the west and east, with the border of the Bug River serving as a dividing line between the two zones. Many Polish Jews fled east to the Soviet zone, but their lack of reliable information and uncertainty led many of them to apply for return to western Poland, to the area which the Germans were occupying. When Stalin ordered them deported to Siberian labor camps, they were fortunately spared the results of their horrible decision. While life in the Soviet Union was difficult, most of the transported Jews survived the Holocaust and were able to reconstruct new lives in the United States and Israel. The film follows seven survivors of the deportation and their reminiscences of the war and its aftermath.
SAVED BY DEPORTATION is an important new film about the survival of thousands of Polish Jews, who without Stalin's order of deportation would otherwise have perished in the Holocaust.
79 Minutes, DVD ISBN: 978-1-877684-72-2
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The New Samaritans
The Samaritans are one of the most enigmatic people living in Israel today. Who are these people and where did they come from? According to their genealogy records, they are directly descended from Adam, and have existed as an independent people for 3600 years. Although they observe most Jewish holidays, they have a separate Torah (Bible), and worship at Mount Gerizim in Shechem (Nablus), Israel, instead of in Jerusalem. Samaritans have also lived separate ethnically, never intermarrying with either Arabs or Jews. However, in recent years, due to the small number of Samaritans in the world— fewer than 900—and the inevitable inbreeding of their population, genetic disabilities have taken their toll, with 9% of their population being mute and retarded. It is this fear of having a disabled offspring that leads Yair and Rajaiiy to petition the High Priest of the Samaritans to marry outside the group.
In THE NEW SAMARITANS, Yair and Rajaiiy are given permission by the High Priest to marry wives from Ukraine and Russia. They do so, bringing them back to Shechem to become part of the Samaritan community. The film follows the wives of Yair and Rajaiiy and shows their acculturation to the Samaritan religion. It also provides an introduction to this interesting remnant of a people who are prominently featured in the New Testament, and have been living in Israel for the past 2500 years. 52 Minutes, DVD ISBN: 978-1-877684-71-5
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From Shtetl to Swing
Bursting with energy, this documentary examines the seemingly inevitable marriage of the Yiddish music of Russian Jewish immigrants to the raucous rhythms of Harlem jazz in the 1920s. Soulfully narrated by Harvey Fierstein in his trademark raspy voice, the film concisely explores the social conditions that produced Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Al Jolson, and others, noting themes and musical elements of instrumentation and composition shared with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong.
The film posits that the swing music performed by Benny Goodman and his ethnically integrated orchestra combines elements of both Jewish music and jazz. Second only to the music in this film are the visual elements, consisting of vintage New York City footage and film clips, combining for an engaging look at the mingling of ethnicities, rising industrialism and elevation of pop music in the early twentieth century. —BOOKLIST, December 2007 Recommended, VIDEO LIBRARIAN, February 2008 52 Minutes, DVD ISBN: 978-1-877684-70-8
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The Holocause Collection — 7 DVDs
A Remembrance of History's Lowest Point
AMBULANCE -The classic trigger film of the Holocaust depicting the use of disguised ambulances as killing vans of Jewish children.
CHILDREN OF THE EXODUS -The uplifting film of child survivors of the Holocaust who miraculously sailed to Israel on the actual ship Exodus 1947.
EICHMANN: THE NAZI FUGITIVE -The architect of the Holocaust and his eventual capture.
LEGACY OF ANNE FRANK - One Jewish girl's testament to hope during the Holocaust. Featuring Otto Frank and Miep Gies.
MEMORANDUM -The survivors of Bergen Belsen concentration camp return to the scene of their torment.
POLAND/KOLBUSZOWA -A look back at the world of the Shtetl, which was destroyed by the Holocaust.
SIGHET, SIGHET -Elie Wiesel's haunting return to his hometown in Hungary, where the town's Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, never to return.
ORDER NOW! Individual titles $ 24.95 &mdash The entire set only $99.95 &mdash a saving of 43%.
THE CAVALCADE OF ISRAEL
A look at Israel Today and Yesterday
13 DVDS on Israel
Individual titles $24.95 - Save $124 - Order the entire series for only $199.95
ISRAEL: THE PROMISE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE (Inspiring look at the Jewish people and their destiny in Israel)
ISRAEL: THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE (The people of Israel today)
TO REALIZE A DREAM (History of Zionism)
JERUSALEM GATES OF TIME (Rebuilding of Jerusalem)
SECRETS OF JERUSALEM (The archaeology of Jerusalem)
PALESTINE FOR VICTORY (Pre-independence Israel during World War II)
SIX DAYS IN JUNE (The Six Day War)
SEA OF DREAMS (The Sea of Galilee in history and today)
HERZL (The founder of the Zionist Movement)
MELODIES OF INDEPENDENCE (Kibbutz Geva and the Gevatron)
OPERATION SOLOMON (The rescue of Ethiopian Jewry)
LET MY PEOPLE GO (The saga of the Jewish People from the Holocaust to the birth of Israel)
THE IBEX OF EIN-GEDI (Nature and wildlife in Israel)
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350 YEARS OF AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY - 11 Videos for $119.95!
A stirring collection of 11 videos:
- NO WREATH AND NO TRUMPET The Story of Emma Lazarus-Includes the New Colossus
- MR. FLANAGAN, THE CHAPLAIN AND MR. LINCOLN
The Story of the First Jewish Chaplain in the Union Army - THE TRAPDOOR First Synagogue in the U.S.-Includes George Washington's Letter
- THE GIFT How Judah Touro Freed a Slave and Learned the Gift of Freedom
- RENDEZVOUS WITH FREEDOM A History of American Jewry
- WHERE WE CAME FROM The Story of American Jewish Immigration
- CALL IT SLEEP The American Jewish Immigrant Experience in Fiction
- THE SEARCH The Story of Lillian Wald, Founder of the Henry Street Settlement
- THE RED BOX The Story of Rabbi Gershom Seixas, a Friend of George Washington
- THE PUGNACIOUS SAILING MASTER The Story of Commodore Uriah Philips Levy
- AMERICA, I LOVE YOU! Powerful Trigger Film About American and Jewish Identity
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CONFRONTATION AT CONCORDIA - 47 Minutes
In 2003 the Concordia University of Montreal Student Government, in tacit agreement with the Arab Student Union, banned the Jewish fraternal organization Hillel from the campus as part of a campaign of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and Israel. While the vehemence of Arab and left-wing hatred of Israel is now widespread on college campuses in North America, what made this especially ominous was that Hillel was blamed by the student government for a riot staged by Arab students and their left-wing cohorts against the appearance of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As a result of the riot, Netanyahu’s speech was canceled. Further, the Hillel chapter at Concordia University was banned from the Concordia campus. This marked only the second time in history that a Hillel chapter was banned from a college campus; the first time being in Austria just prior to the Anschluss with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
Is there a connection between the circumstances of the Jew hatred of prewar Europe and the present resurgence of anti-semitism and hatred of Israel today? Tacitly and openly supported by college administrators, who use the argument of a free marketplace of ideas, college campuses have turned into a refuge of authoritarian hate-filled groups that hide behind the myth of academic freedom. “Confrontation at Concordia,” a new balanced and well researched documen-tary by Martin Himel, explores the phenomenon of what happened at Concordia University in Canada, and leads to the even wider question of what snowball effects such anti-Israel and anti-Jewish groups on college campuses may soon have on the general population itself.
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EYE WITNESS - 38 Minutes
We are reminded of the Holocaust by testimonies of victims who miraculously survived, by scant records kept by the perpetrators who survived, by third parties (Swedish businessmen and diplomats, German industrialists, members of various intelligence agencies such as M16, OSS, Italian Intelligence, and Project Ultra), and also by the artists who used whatever materials they had available to draw a record of this lowest point in civilization’s epoch.
Eye Witness is a documentary about artists, both in concentration camps and in hiding, who sketched the evil, suffering and death wrought by the Germans during the Holocaust. Dinah Gottliebova and her mother were rescued by the notorious Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz and required to draw the features of Gypsies before the Gypsies were exterminated. Later Ms. Gottliebova drew pictures of Nazi officers themselves. Felix Nussbaum drew his great works “The Secret,” “The Organ Grinder,” and “the Dance of Death”, while in hiding. Non Jews such as Jan Kompski and Mieczslaw Konschelniak drew scenes of Auschhwitz and other camps, both during and after the war.
The ineffable quality of their art brings to life the screams and cries of millions of victims of the Holocaust.
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SPLIT - 50 Minutes
After the war, the German people exhibited an almost universal amnesia about the atrocities they had inflicted upon the conquered peoples of Europe, especially about the genocide and holocaust they had ordered and carried out against the Jews. In this environment, Bernd Kendler comes of age with a gnawing doubt about the self-righteous rectitude of his fellow Germans. In 1961, in growing frustration at these attitudes, he deserts the German air force and flees to Israel. In Israel he converts to Judaism, becomes known as “Ben Tal,” marries and has children.
Split deals with his son Dan’s desires to connect with his father’s prior life, and to go to Ben’s German family to learn about their past. In Germany, Dan finds that beneath the cloying sweetness of his German cousins, aunts and uncles, there is a desire to “close the book” on the monstrous crimes that the German people had committed against the Jews.
Dan discovers that his Uncle Jorg had been a Nazi who as a cinematographer had close access to Hitler and to other German leaders. Only Ben’s brother, Dan’s Uncle Dieter, has the honesty to acknowledge that he, too, can’t stand the smug attitude of his fellow Germans, and envies his brother Ben’s courage in leaving Germany.
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SISTER WIFE - 60 Minutes
Weary of the harsh way of life in American black ghettos, and motivated by a sense of yearning for a place where they felt they belonged, the Black Hebrews of America moved to Dimona in Israel’s Negev in 1969, to establish a new community as well as a new identity.
In Israel they have prospered as a separate community in the framework of their own definition of themselves as Hebrew Israelites, believing only in the Law of the Torah. As in biblical times, the Black Hebrews practice polygamy, with their culture permitting men to marry up to seven women.
Sister Wife describes this unique culture by following the integration of a second, much younger wife into a previously long, well established marriage. The pathos, ironies and complexities of a patriarchal community are shown with a winning mixture of seriousness and humor.
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BLUE AND WHITE IN RED SQUARE - 60 Minutes
Blue and White in Red Square is the story of the 1998 return of young Russian born Israeli musicians , along with 10 other youth orchestras, sto a giant concert in Red Square. The former Soviet Union, shown in footage of giant military parades with the dictator Stalin looking on, was a cruel, authoritarian regime where music was one of the few freedoms allowed to the Jewish population. Legendary Russian Jewish artists, all of whom fled Russia when the opportunity presented itself (with the exception of David Oistrakh who was too young at the time), include Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Nathan Milstein, Mischa Elman, and Gregor Piatigorsky.
During the 1970’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s, there was a massive emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Many of these immigrants were musicians, and many of their children followed in their footsteps. In this film, The Young Israel Philharmonic, conducted by Zev Dorman, travels to Moscow for two concerts, the first the important concert at the Tschaikovsky Conservatory, and the second a massive gala concert conducted by Valery Gergiev in Red Square, with more than 1000 musicians from 25 countries.
In their free time, the Israeli musicians , keeping a low profile as Jews, reconnect with their former lives in Russia. A special concert at a Jewish camp is reflective of the changes in Russia, since it is held at a former vacation retreat for communist party members. The finale includes a light show, and a concert of 1000 musicians playing together with spirit and gusto.
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A Conversation with Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 30 Minutes
This interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the most famous Yiddish writers, discusses Singer’s identification as a “Jewish” but secular writer. The son of a rabbi, his parents were shamed that both Singer and his older brother, I.J. Singer, became secular rather than religious writers, which was contrary to their deeply religious upbringing.
Although Singer’s earliest writings were in Hebrew, he soon switched to Yiddish, which he felt was a more expressive language at the time. But when he first came to the United States from Poland in 1935, he didn’t write for five years, until he realized that Yiddish in the United States was indeed still vibrantly alive. His prognosis at the time of the filming of this conversation, however, was that Yiddish will not be a language spoken by the masses in the near future, as it has been for the past 300-400 years.
Singer often wrote about spirits, the devil and the supernatural. He noted that the devil occasionally won in his writings, because if the devil were always to lose, the writing becomes a cliché. He felt that the short story is an important art, because it can be told completely and perfectly, and is under the total control of the writer; whereas the novel is so long that it takes many twists for which the writer cannot always anticipate or plan. His writings are filled with the tyranny of passions and with obsession and destruction, but concomitantly there is a plethora of the creative potential of emotions.
Today Singer still remains as a strong, creative voice of the Jewish condition, of the joys, sorrows, darkness and light, all of which characterize the Jewish people of yesterday and today.
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The Pugnacious Sailing Master - 30 Minutes
Uriah Phillips Levy, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1792, joined the Navy when he was ten years old, but took a leave of absence when he was 12, in order to study for his Bar Mitzvah. During his years in the Navy he willingly subjected himself to being put through six different court-martial proceedings and three expulsions brought against him by the US Navy, all related to anti-semitic incidents where he basically refused to walk away from his identity as a Jew, or to incidents when he refused to walk away from his concerns and obligations to those who served with and under him.
The Pugnacious Sailing Master shows Levy entering a Naval ship as a Sailing Master. Seeing a sailor being flogged, he stops the flogging, which he is not authorized to do. He throws the flogging whip overboard, and slaps the face of the man who is whipping the sailor. Brought up on charges, he refuses to back down, but receives no punishment other than a mild reprimand.
Levy spoke long and hard against the cruel and inhuman punishment of flogging in the armed forces. His campaign to rid the Navy of this barbaric punishment finally resulted in its repeal in l938, the year of his death, by which point he had been promoted to the position of Commodore of the Mediterranean. The Pugnacious Sailing Master ends with the observation that “Happy is the man who is given to add his small stone to the pyramid of America.
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MR. FLANAGAN, THE CHAPLAIN AND MR. LINCOLN - 30 Minutes
At the beginning of the Civil War, Michael Allen, a Philadelphia religious Jew but not a rabbi (a chaver), joined the 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry, a regiment assembled by Colonel Max Friedman. Know as the "Cameron's Dragoons," the regiment which contained a large portion of Jewish volunteers, elected Allen as a regimental chaplain, the first Jew to serve in this capacity in the United States Army.
As nondenominational chaplain, Captain Allen served as chaplain for all the company's soldiers, regardless of religious affiliation. But on July 22, 1861, Congress enacted a law which required all appointed chaplains to be ordained ministers of a Christian denomination. A representative of the Philadelphia YMCA, visiting the encampment of the 5th Pennsylvania Cavalry shortly thereafter, was appalled to discover that Allen was a Jew, and immediately publicized the fact.
Rather than subject his family to the humiliating ordeal of his dismissal, Allen resigned on September 23, 1861, citing poor health. Thus ended the brief career of the first Jewish chaplain in U.S. military history. The forced resignation of Michael Allen, when so many unqualified chaplains professing Christianity remained in office, enraged Colonel Friedman as an act of anti-Jewish bigotry that should not go unanswered.
Determined to appoint a Jewish chaplain for his regiment, but wanting a man of impeccable credentials whose rejection by the government could be for no reason other than religious prejudice, Friedman turned to the recently established Board of Delegates of American Israelites, whose charge was the safeguarding of civil rights of the Jewish community, to recommend a suitable candidate. The man selected was a Dutch Jew educated in England, the civilian Rabbi Arnold Fischel. Having recently resigned as Rabbi of New York's Sephardic congregation Shearith Israel, Rabbi Fischel was immediately available. This video shows the historical events leading to the appointment of Rabbi Fischel as the first legally appointed Jewish chaplain in the Union Army.
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NO WREATH AND NO TRUMPET - 30 Minutes
Emma Lazarus's words from her poem "The New Colossus," live into the 21st century on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me you tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."
Lazarus was one of six daughters of the wealthy Sephardic New York City merchant, Moses Lazarus. It was not until age 30, after meeting Edmund Steadman, literary critic and founder of a respected literary magazine, that the already accomplished poet was introduced to the realities of life outside her upper class home, discovering the often tragic and difficult lives of newly arrived Jewish immigrants, and the richness of her Jewish heritage.
Throwing herself fully into Jewish subject matter, Lazarus tackled issues of anti-semitism forcefully and directly. A protege of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lazarus ranks along with Emily Dickinson as two of the most talented women poets of the nineteenth century.
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LET MY PEOPLE GO - 54 Minutes
The epic story of the Jewish people and their search for a homeland. It
is a stirring video of the struggles, sorrows, and the historic ordeal of
the Jew, from the ghetto and holocaust to the founding of the State of
Israel.
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KAROUSSEL - 63 Minutes
In 1944, following a visit by the Red Cross to the Theresienstadt Model Ghetto in Poland, SS head Heinrich Himmler ordered the production of a propaganda film about the ghetto, to combat “rumors” of Polish extermination camps for Jews.
Accordingly, Kurt Geron, of film star of Weimar Germany, directed a chilling film, "Hitler Gives the Jews a City," filling it with bucolic scenes, happy faces, children playing and eating, and a general air of prosperity and contentment. The total lie of the film was exposed with the deportation of the Jews of Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and extermination, both during and at the conclusion of filming. Geron, perhaps best known for his roles of Tiger Brown in the "Threepenny Opera" and "The Blue Angel" (starring Marlene Dietrich), was typical of the Jewish refugee who fled from Germany in 1933, only to be ensnared by the Germans in Holland 7 years later. Although Geron thought that he himself would be spared the final destination of European Jewry because of his cooperation, the ovens of Auschwitz were his fate.
Karoussel, named for a cabaret at Theresienstadt that Geron had created, shows life and fate intermeshed with the decadence of Weimar Germany, along with the anti-Semitism of pre-war Europe leading up to the Holocaust.
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WALL OF SILENCE - 58 Minutes
By Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne Wall of Silence chronicles a small event of the Holocaust in the closing days of the War in the Austrian border town of Rechnitz. In March 1945, with the Red Army closing in, Hungarian Jews, spared from Auschwitz to serve as slave laborers, were murdered en masse one night in a drunken orgy by German and Austrian revelers after one of their many parties. With a mixture of alcohol and anti-Semitic hatred, the Germans and Austrians marched 180 exhausted Hungarian Jews from their quarters in the cellar dungeon of the town's castle to a spot near a Christian monument, There they reenacted the other ways Jews were murdered by Germans aside from the gas chambers: they had the Jews dig their own graves, and shot them. The townspeople recount the scene of horror, describing how the killers threw dirt on the bodies, often with blood seeping to the surface along with arms and limbs.
What sets the Holocaust apart from the ravages of war, plunder, rape, massacres, and random killings that the Germans wreaked on Europe during the Second World War is that from the time of the invasion of Russia in June 1941 and the Wansee Conference in January 1942, the Germans formulated a total war of destruction on European Jewry.
In Wall of Silence, this basic truth forms the background of a "Cat and Mouse" game between the holocaust survivor Isadore Sandorffy, who wants to find the location of the mass grave in order to give these Jews a proper burial, and the people of Rechnitz who give wrong clues, misinformation, and self-righteous indignation in objecting to the search. The locals' thinly disguised hatred of the Jews remains under a veneer of Christian religiosity, non cooperation, and attitude that the Holocaust is past history. This film is really about those who did the killings and their silent allies who cannot admit their guilt and complicity in this most terrible event in history.
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THE PHOTOGRAPHER - 56 Minutes
The Lodz Ghetto was the last remaining organized Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Europe. Under the leadership of Chaim Rumkowski, who served as President of a “Council of Jewish Elders,” the ghetto produced clothing and other goods for the German Army. The horrific cost that the Germans imposed upon the leaders of the ghetto was to have them agree to a voluntary deportation of all children, the sick, and the elderly. Although Rumkowski felt that his willing collaboration with German officials would save him and his family from extermination, his eventual “reward” was to be deported to Auschwitz, where he was thrown into the ovens alive, along with his family.
The Photographer portrays the rarefied evil of the Germans, using actual color slides taken by a minor Nazi functionary, Walter Genewein, accompanied by commentary by Arnold Mostowicz, a Jewish survivor.
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