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- Within Brooklyn's ultra-orthodox Jewish community, a widower battles for custody of his son. A tender drama performed entirely in Yiddish, the film intimately explores the nature of faith and the price of parenthood.
- When you wage war on your community, you wage war on your family.
- The 1941 invasion of Soviet Ukraine by Nazi Germany is shown through the life of inhabitants of a Yiddish village at the border of Poland.
- The mystical love story between Chonen, a poor Talmud student, and Lea, a girl from a wealthy family, depicts the traditional folk culture of Polish Jews before WW2.
- In a kosher meat packaging plant. Avrum one of the owners uncovers a operation involving his partner selling nonkosher meat under their company name. Can he stop it before it becomes a scandal and ruines the company?
- The action of the movie takes place in the thirties before the Jewish pogrom in the border town of Poland, which became a kind of emigration zone. Two teenagers - Ivan and Abram - run away from the dictates of adults into a big life.
- Mamele embraces the entire gamut of interwar Jewish life in Lodz - tenements and unemployed Jews, nightclubs and gangsters, religious Jews celebrating Sukkot - but the film belongs to Molly Picon who romps undaunted through her dutiful daughter role saving siblings, keeping the family intact, singing and acting her way through the stages of a woman's life from childhood to old age.
- Saül Birnbaum is a "hidden child", who, at the age of six, was separated from his parents to escape the Holocaust. He was sent away by the so-called "Kindertransport". In 1986, Saül is on the path to recovery: he has opened a delicatessen unlike any other, where movies are shown every day. Saül and his protégé, Joakin, a young Chilean director who fled from Pinochet's dictatorship, decide to write the story of Saül's childhood and turn it into a film, allowing both of them to "heal" just a little more. However, love comes knocking on Saül's door, forcing him to confront his past.
- From an early age Yossi Klein received a special education. He was prepared for another Holocaust. So were other children in Boro Park, the largest Orthodox survivor community in America, and this candid portrait of a young Jewish activist coming to terms with his father's traumatic history is as bracing as any fiction. Through his writing and activism, Yossi attempts to carry on the legacy of struggle passed on to him. A portrait emerges of a young man whose world view and personal outlook have been principally shaped by an event that took place before he was born.
- Seven young people tell their personal stories with the Yiddish language while discussing the life and work of avant-garde Yiddish poets.
- A jewish cantor is seduced by the allure of opera when introduced to it by two attractive young Poles.
- Two young people experience love and loss while in hiding during WWII. After a life of regret, the young man, now old, is faced with an opportunity for redemption.
- One of the last Yiddish films made in Poland before the Nazi invasion, this film tells the story of a mother's persistent struggles to support her three children in pre-war World War II Polish Ukraine. After her family is pulled apart by severe poverty and the turmoil of war, she and her children make their way to New York and turn to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for help.
- This rarely-seen later work by Yiddish cinema mogul Joseph Seiden observes the hardships and heartaches of three sisters as they seek romantic happiness, while struggling to remain faithful to the traditions of their parents. Kino Now
- Nat Silver has been engaged 7 times already. This time, his 8th, he's really going to get married. But a visitor shows up, Shirley's old boyfriend. With a gun ! He'll kill himself unless he can have Shirley back, and Nat graciously gives in. According to Nat's mother, his Uncle Shya was unlucky at love but lucky as a matchmaker, and Nat is just like Shya. Nat tells his family he's going to Italy. But he remains in New York and sets himself up with a new name and new business, Nat Gold, Advisor in Human Relations...
- The original, non-musical film version of the book which inspired "Fiddler on the Roof".
- On May 14, 1948 in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the creation of the State of Israel... A historic date for Jews around the world, after 2,000 years of exile and the suffering endured by the survivors of the concentration camps. the death. But for more than 700,000 Palestinians who would have to leave their own lands, it was the beginning of an injustice. Through the itinerary of several families, the two documentaries presented here trace the destiny of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples throughout the 20th century. Illustrated with numerous unpublished documents, in color or colorized, from amateur films, family archives or excerpts from private diaries, the films propose to discover how the persecutions suffered by the Jewish people nourished the hope embodied by the Zionist dream, and led to the creation of the State of Israel, thus precipitating the misfortune of the Palestinian people.
- The last Yiddish feature made in Poland before WWII, this 1939 film was based on a 1907 play by the prolific playwright Jacob Gordin. Best known for his folksy didacticism and moralism, Gordin brought the common life of the Lower East Side to the Yiddish stage. With over 100 plays to his credit, Gordin was a formative influence on modern Yiddish theater. He was so popular among theatergoers that reportedly a quarter of a million people attended his funeral in New York City. Without a Home is the story of the separation and hardships faced by immigrants in America at the turn of the century. Its touching portrayal of the hardships of immigrant life enthralled Jewish theater audiences and it became part of the standard Yiddish stage repertoire in America and Poland. The film provides a poignant and dramatic picture of a difficult era, focusing on the bleak prospects for the survival of traditional Jewish family values. When the eldest son of the Rivkin family is drowned, the father leaves his family in Europe to go to America. There he finds only financial hardship and loneliness, struggling to find a way to bring the rest of his family over. The stellar cast includes stage actress Ida Kaminska and the hilarious comedy duo, Dzigan and Shumacher, who provide a healthy measure of comic relief. The title, Without a Home, intended by Gordin to symbolize the uprooted Jewish immigrant family and by extension, the Jewish people, was a particularly poignant one for Jewish film audiences in Poland on the eve of WWII. The film underscored the growing sense among Polish Jews facing the Nazi threat and increasing antisemitism in Poland that they too might soon be "without a home."
- Written by Israel Becker, this is the first feature film to represent the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective. Shot on location at Landsberg, the largest DP camp in U.S.-occupied Germany, and mixing neorealist and expressionist styles, the film follows a Polish Jew and his family from pre-war Warsaw through Auschwitz and the DP camps.
- In this, Poland's last Yiddish feature film, comedy duo Dzigan and Shumacher play all the parts in a Sholem Aleichem story staged for an audience of children who survived the Holocaust.
- Wealthy, powerful sweatshop owner falls in love with employee's teenage daughter, who feels obligated to marry him after he shares his wealth with her parents, though she actually loves a young Marxist unionizer.
- A young woman posing as a man in a group of klezmer musicians in Poland.
- Historical documentary made up of footage and stills shot by the Nazis. A compilation of testimony from witnesses who appeared at the Eichmann trial provides a telling narrative.
- Ulmer's soulful, open-air adaptation of Peretz Hirshbein's classic play heralded the Golden Age of Yiddish cinema. When an ascetic young scholar ventures into the countryside, searching for the city of "true Jews," he learns some unexpected lessons from the Jewish peasants who take him in as a tutor for their children.
- The incredible story of Avraham Sutskever, the greatest Yiddish poet, who saved manuscripts from the Nazis, survived WWII due to Stalin's special rescue plane, testified in the Nuremberg Trials, and died anonymously in Tel Aviv.
- Mothers of Today includes the sole motion picture performance of radio star Esther Field, who was well known on the airwaves of the 1930s as the 'Yiddishe Mama.' The film exemplifies the Yiddish film genre of shund, a brand of popular entertainment which appealed to working-class Jewish-American immigrant audiences with broadly-drawn, sentimental stories that reflected the daily life and culture of a distinctively American Yiddish community. While the shund films were invariably low-budget (and low-brow) affairs, these humble productions formed an important part of life in the United States for their audience. For actresses such as Field or Celia Adler (star of Where is My Child?, also directed by Lynn in 1939), shund offered one of the few opportunities to play strong leading roles. In retrospect, Mothers of Today is an important cultural artifact expressing the anxieties of Jewish immigrant families faced with the younger generation's increasing assimilation into mainstream American society. Shund often dealt with the plight of the Jewish mother, recognizing the important role women played in Jewish family life during the difficult period of immigration. Such is the case with Mothers of Today, in which Field plays a mother coping with her children's troubles resulting from their straying from Jewish tradition. In one subplot, a cantor's son led astray by a woman of "questionable morality" becomes involved with gangsters and ends up stealing the deed to his mother's store. On March 14, 1939, Film Daily reviewed Mothers of Today as follows: "Heavy tragedy, which seems to be an essential basis of all Yiddish dramas, is done to a turn in this new film and it should please the dyed in the wool Yiddish fans. Produced on a small budget with a hurried shooting schedule, the film has considerable merit. Cast members, with the exception of the talented Esther Field, were recruited from the stage for their initial appearance on the screen, and they give Miss Field adequate support. Henry Lynn directs the film feelingly. The story deals with the tragedies which beset Miss Field as her children get in trouble."
- Make sure there's a hanky nearby: After the death of their mother, older sister Betty works tirelessly, supporting her sister through nursing school and her fiancée through medical school only to see her happiness shattered when her sister and fiancée fall in love.
- A German-Jewish artist encounters German anti-semitism when his masterpiece is rejected by the Berlin Academy of Art. Later, the figure in the painting comes to life and tells him the history of the Jews' persecution. This unusual film ends with footage of an anti-Hitler rally at New York City's Madison Square Garden.
- Mirele Efros, "the Jewish Queen Lear," was the masterpiece of influential Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin. Berta Gersten gives a memorable performance as Mirele, a wealthy and pious widow whose devotion to her children extends to hand-picking a wife for her eldest son. Unfortunately, she gravely mistakes the young woman's character.
- Moishe Oysher gives his most robust performance as a passionate shtetl blacksmith who must struggle against temptation to become a mensch. Ulmer's film is a musical version of David Pinski's classic 1906 play Yankl der Schmid.
- Fictional re-enactments about the early years in Belgium of the director's parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, and scenes taken in modern Brussels in this elliptical experimental feature.
- 'A Mentsh' is a movie shot entirely in the Yiddish language, which makes it unique. It's set in the former multinational city of Lviv, Ukraine, and the first part of a planned Yiddish trilogy (Lviv, Tel Aviv, New York). Lviv was a centre of Jewish life for 600 years. 75 years after the beginning of World War II, Boris Dorfman takes us on a trip to all the places of horror and hope reflecting the Jewish history. The 90-year-old activist is virtually the last one in town still speaking the almost extinct language of Yiddish. While remembering the past, he lives in the present and tries to prepare the people for the future. He is 'a mentsh', someone full of love and empathy.
- Jenny is a young woman torn between two childhood boyfriends. Refusing to marry Joseph, who has become a rabbi, she elopes instead with Jack, an actor who makes her pregnant and eventually abandons her.
- Starring real-life mother and daughter Ester-Rokhl Kaminska and Ida Kaminska, this film is a precursor to the 1937 classic, The Dybbuk, featuring the same classic tale of frustrated love and destiny and the breaking/fulfillment of vows.
- This musical drama marks the screen debut of Moishe Oysher, in a film critic J. Hoberman calls an "anti-Jazz Singer." Oysher stars as a wayward youth who makes his way from his Polish shtetl to New York's Lower East Side where he is "discovered" and becomes a well-known singer. Ultimately, he returns home to the Old Country and reunites with his parents and his childhood sweetheart.
- Based on a play by Jacob Gordin, God, Man and Devil centers on a wager between God and Satan that has dire consequences. Beware, the film cautions, when money sounds sweeter than music.
- An elderly couple, Mendel and Hannah Shapiro, need to raise money to hang onto their farm and turn to their adult children for help.
- Nathan Rahinowita is a bookkeeper for a dress manufacturer, and in his spare time he dabbles at inventions. Oner day he is offered $3000 for one of his inventions, and premises to get back to the cl;ient the next day with answer. However, when he learns that Sam, his daughter's fiance, is going to jail for embezzling $500 from his bank, Nathan goes to Sam's father to ask him to put up the money, but the man refuses, Nathan argues that the power of life comes through finding happiness in one's children's lives and that parents must not forget their obligations to their children. Mr. Schindler tells Nate that Sam has stolen from him before and mocks Nathan's faith in children. Complications ensue.
- Setting off from Vilna to spend his last days in the Holy Land, an arrogant old man spurns the youngest of his three daughters and leaves his fortune in the wrong hands.
- Two friends make a sacred pact pledging their newborn children, Rachel and Jacob, in marriage. Based on the same legend as S. Ansky's classic play The Dybbuk, this spirited film offers the divine intervention of Elijah.
- A young woman tries to repay her adoptive parents' kindness by shielding their biological child, who has gotten involved with an embezzler, from the police.
- In gratitude for saving his life, Piotr offers the brutish Zhuck the hand of his daughter, Olga, who loves Alexis, a sailor home on leave. However, Borrah, an old chemist, tosses a tear bomb during the wedding ceremony, and Alexis escapes with Olga to a shack belonging to Darya, Zhuck's rejected sweetheart. Accusing Piotr of a double-cross, Zhuck hears the other fishermen reveal his hesitation during his rescue of Piotr, so that the latter might sign a will beneficial to him. Amid a happy celebration Alexis and Olga marry with Piotr's blessing.