In 1963, when apartheid South Africa was being convulsed by a nation-wide wave of terrorism, the police raided a farm house in Rivonia, near Johannesburg, and arrested several leaders of the African National Congress, including Nelson Mandela. As he and his shackled black and white colleagues were being led away to vans, one of the […]
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from May 3-13, is presenting two very different Israeli movies — The Cakemaker and Shelter. Ophir Graizer’s The Cakemaker, set in Jerusalem and Berlin, unfolds in German, Hebrew and English. A love story with a twist, this splendid movie will be screened on May 7 and 9. Oren (Roy […]
When Ferenc (Ferike) Kishont arrived in Israel in 1949, he spoke not a single word of Hebrew. But within a decade, he had changed his name to Ephraim Kishon and had become one of Israel’s most successful writers. Before he passed away, he had written 40 books and was the most translated author in Israeli […]
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from May 3-13 this year, is presenting two movies about the Holocaust. Saving Auschwitz? is a French documentary and The Testament is Israeli. The Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, the ultimate symbol of evil, has been expropriated for various purposes over the decades, as Jonathan Hayoun’s bracing documentary, Saving Auschwitz?, […]
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from May 3 to May 13 this year, is presenting three movies from Germany. Bye-Bye Germany is set in 1946 as Holocaust survivors in Frankfurt struggle to renew their lives amid the rubble of the war. The Invisibles follows the lives of four Jews in Berlin who went into hiding between […]
The Jewish contribution to the Bollywood movie industry is explored exhaustively by Danny Ben-Moshe in his intriguing documentary, Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 6 and 9. From the 1920s until the 1960s, several of its leading ladies and one of its […]
The forthcoming Toronto Jewish Film Festival is presenting two documentaries about former Jewish communities in the Arab world. Remember Baghdad and Libya: The Last Exodus will be respectively screened on May 9 and 11 and on May 7, 8 and 9. Iraq, a nation torn by strife and violence, once had one of the most distinguished Jewish […]
The South Beach enclave of Miami Beach was home to a vibrant community of Jewish retirees and Holocaust survivors from the 1960s to the 1970s. Resembling a transplanted shtetl, it was mainly populated by former garment workers from New York City who were lured there by the warm weather and the relatively low cost of […]
Stephane Benhamou’s intriguing documentary, The No. 5 War, scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 6 and May 8, is centered around Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, the Parisian fashion designer whose name is synonymous with Chanel No. 5, which, for a while after its debut in 1921, was the world’s most popular […]
Oskar Groning, a functionary at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland, was charged with being an accessory to mass murder and put on trial in Germany in 2015, when he was 93 years old. Assigned to the camp as a bookkeeper, he spent much of his time there as a collector of valuables expropriated […]