Virtual screening

Marvell Ginsburg’s renowned children’s book has been educating young children about the Holocaust for generations, telling the true story of the rescue and restoration of a small Torah from Czechoslovakia. This is now an animated film, narrated by Ed Asner, that brings illustrator Martin Lemel- man’s rich artwork to life and allows this story of redemption to reach a much broader audience.

Film: 21 minutes

Director: Marc Bennett

Production countries: USA

Year: 2019

“A mystery involving a religious historian and his family. He is willing to risk everything to discover the truth.”
Yoel Halberstam, a senior Holocaust researcher, is in the midst of a legal battle with powerful forces in Austria concerning a massacre of Jews that occurred during WWII. An influential family of industrialists on whose land the murder took place is planning a real estate project on the very same property. Yoel suspects that their aim is to bury the affair for good, but he can’t find the conclusive evidence that would stop the project. Meticulous in his quest, Yoel toils in the basement of the Holocaust Institute in Jerusalem. While investigating the incident, Yoel examines classified testimonies of Holocaust survivors, and he is shocked to discover a testimony he never knew existed—one given by his mother in which she confesses to a substantial secret from her past. With his personal and professional life at stake, Yoel secretly pursues the lead, risking everything—career, wife and son, even his own beliefs—to solve the mystery about his identify.

Film: 94 minutes

Director: Amichai Greenberg

Production country: Israel

Year: 2017

“Tired of being pushed around, a disenfranchised Sephardic father, whose daughter is expelled from a school for her ethnicity, launches the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party.”
When Yakov Cohen’s daughter is expelled from school for ethnic reasons, he decides to fight back. It’s 1983, and Yakov, a printer in Jerusalem, is just a regular guy. He has no knowledge of politics, no money, no connections, and no political experience. But he does have the will and the passion to take action, and a belief that he and other Sephardic Jews should be able to hold their heads up high. Yakov brings two friends along, and together they start the first ethnic political group in Jerusalem, with an operation characteristic of the people they represent: not the suit-wearing types, but rather the people working their way up from the bottom. Their operation is informal, full of love for their fellow man, and animated by a sense of humor and a great deal of rage.

Film: 99 minutes

Director: Eliran Malka

Production country: Israel

Year: 2018

A comedy about how a mishap at a Jerusalem synagogue causes a major rift in a devout community in Jerusalem.”
When the women’s balcony in a small Jerusalem synagogue collapses, leaving the rabbi’s wife in a coma and the rabbi in shock, the congregation falls into crisis. A charismatic Hasidic rabbi appears to be a savior after the accident, but he slowly starts pushing his fundamentalist ways among the Modern Orthodox congregants. The changes he tries to impose test the women’s friendships and create a rift between the community’s women and men in this rousing tale about women speaking truth to patriarchal power.

Film: 96 minutes

Directors: Shlomit Nehama and Emil Ben-Shimon

Production country: Israel

Year: 2016

“A Holocaust survivor’s son living in Trieste as a surgeon begins to doubt his actions of refusing to help a victim of a traffic accident. An unusual moral tale.”
Simone Segre, a renowned surgeon of Jewish origins, lives in the city of Trieste in the northeast of Italy. He has a quiet life, an elegant apartment, and no connection with his past. One day he finds himself assisting a male victim of a hit-and-run accident. But when he discovers a Nazi tattoo on his chest, Simone abandons him to his destiny. Filled with guilt, he ends up tracing the man’s family: Marica, the eldest daughter; Marcello, a teenager plagued with racial hate; and little Paolo. The night will come when Marica knocks at Simone’s door and unknowingly asks for payback.
MATURE CONTENT

Film: 96 minutes

Director: Mauro Mancini

Production countries:  Italy, Poland

Year: 2020

”Can we leave past sins behind? Our sages say we can.” Such are the opening lines that introduce this moving story about the relationship between a dedicated yeshiva student, Yochai, and terminally-ill 18-year-old Ayelet. When Ayelet is diagnosed with advanced bone cancer, she stubbornly refuses treatment. Her desperate father asks Yochai to become her spiritual mentor with the hope that he can persuade her to seek medical help. Ayelet is amused by what she perceives as Yochai”s awkward innocence but fascinated by his attempts to forge a deep relationship with God. Yochai, for his part, is mesmerized by Ayelet”s beauty and grace and is totally overwhelmed by being in such close proximity to a woman for the first time in his life. Finding himself deeply attracted to Ayelet, Yochai faces the most difficult decision of his life–whether to leave the yeshiva or abandon his newfound love.

Film: 62 minutes

Director: Amichai Greenberg

Production country: Israel

Year: 2015

In this gentle, beautifully rendered historical family drama, a German- Jewish girl takes her first steps into adulthood, as world events intrude on her happy, carefree existence. Nine-year-old Anna is too busy with schoolwork and friends to notice Hitler’s face glaring from posters plastered all over 1933 Berlin. But when her father suddenly vanishes, and the family is secretly hurried out of Germany, Anna begins to understand life will never be the same. What follows is a courageous adventure full of fear and uncertainty, as Anna and her family navigate unfamiliar lands and cope with the challenges of being refugees. Oscar-winning filmmaker Caroline Link directs this adaptation of Judith Kerr’s semiautobiographical bestselling children’s novel.
FAMILY FRIENDLY

Film: 119 minutes

Director: Caroline Link

Production countries: Germany, Switzerland

Year: 2019

Martin Goldsmith never knew what happened to his parents before they escaped from Germany in 1941. Over a weekend, he confronts his father, and we are brought back to the complex and confusing 1930s. His parents, talented musicians, are only able to perform as members of the Jewish Cultural Federation, an extraordinary artistic organization fully controlled by the Reich Chamber of Culture. Featuring Bruno Ganz as Goldsmith’s father in his final performance, this film to all intents and purposes seems like a documentary but is in fact a masterful recreation of Goldsmith’s book ”The Inextinguishable Symphony.”
MATURE LANGUAGE

Orna is the mother of three young children with a husband struggling to start his own restaurant. To help support her family, Orna returns to the workplace, landing a job with a former army superior, Benny, who is now a successful real estate developer. While Orna embraces her new position and tries to balance its demands with her home life, she begins to experience escalating sexual harassment from her boss. Her rapid rise through the ranks and her increasing financial success seem to parallel a pattern of predatory behavior which brings her career and marital relationship to the brink.
MATURE THEMES, NUDITY, GRAPHIC VIOLENCE

Film: 93 minutes

Director: Michal Aviad

Production country: Israel

Year: 2018

PORTRAYAL follows Roman Lapshin across three continents and five nations as he puts together the pieces of a mysterious puzzle and comes to terms with a family legacy and his own personal journey of restoration, growth and healing.

Since he was a child, Roman has been haunted by a secret that his late grandfather revealed to him when he was only 12 years old. A personal disclosure regarding the mysterious and troubling origins of thousands of pieces of missing artwork his grandfather had painted over his lifetime. Roman is convinced that he alone must investigate and expose the murky fate of this art to redeem his grandfather’s name and artistic legacy. But finding the paintings will mean going against the wishes of his entire family—who have been guarding the secret all along. It also means confronting the notorious and powerful man at the center of the mystery, whom Roman believes exploited his grandfather when he was a desperate, recent immigrant to a new country.
MATURE LANGUAGE, SOME INTENSE IMAGES

Film: 96 minutes

Director: Billie Mintz

Production country: Canada

Year: 2020