International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be observed on January 27th and special films and television programs will be shown. This day is observed on the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, and is distinct from Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place in the spring and commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising that occurred on that day. be done.
The January 27th anniversary in Israel tends to be a more low-key event than spring commemorations. But this year, in the wake of the worst genocide of Jews since the Holocaust, carried out by Hamas on October 7 and leading to the outbreak of war, programs about the event will have a special resonance in cinemas and on television. It will be.
The Tel Aviv Cinematheque is showing movies throughout the day to commemorate the event. This includes feature films such as Steven Spielberg’s classic “Schindler’s List.” If you haven’t seen it in a long time, now is your chance to watch it on the big screen, which is more powerful than your TV.
There’s also Giuseppe Piccioni’s The Shadow of the Sun, a more intimate story about the lesser-known subject of Mussolini’s racial laws against Jews in Italy. Riccardo Scamarcio plays a repressed pro-fascist restaurant owner who falls in love with a young Jewish woman (Benedetta Porcaroli) who comes undercover as a waitress. “This is a love story, but it’s not just a love story,” Piccioni said in an interview last year.
Mario Bellocchio’s Rapito (also known as Kidnapping), which is scheduled to be shown at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem cinematheques, tells the bizarre story of a Jewish boy kidnapped in Italy in the 1850s and forced to convert to Catholicism. It deals with incidents of anti-Semitism.
Documentaries that will be screened include The Resistance – They Strike Back, directed by Kirk Wolfinger and Paula S. Apsell (see next article), The Libyan Desert, directed by Sharon Yaish and Goran Riisz Includes Ziad – Desert Holocaust, about concentration camps. Directed by Jasmine Cainy, “Where Are You Going”, a film about Yaakov Gilad, the place to which Libyan Jews were sent. He is a composer who co-wrote Yehuda Polikel’s album Ashes and Dust, which depicts their coming to terms with their Holocaust experiences. The survivor’s parents travel to Poland with her mother.
Hot 8 will be directing Mouly Landsmann’s “European Dream,” a long and complicated battle between two grandsons of a German family living in the United States and Argentina to recover art stolen from their relatives by the Nazis. is being shown.
More Holocaust content now available on Netflix
You might be surprised at how much Holocaust-related content Netflix has to offer. Most are documentaries, but some feature films are also included. I recommend the 2016 drama “Denial”. The drama stars Rachel Weisz as historian Deborah Lipstadt, who now serves as the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. The film tells the story of a defamation lawsuit filed by a prominent Holocaust denier. .
Ordinary Men is a documentary about the Einsatzgruppen, a Nazi death squad that committed many murders, mainly mass shootings of Jews, before the establishment of death camps.
This is not an easy documentary to watch, but I learned some very interesting facts from it. Any Nazi soldier who said he did not want to take part in these massacres was simply excused and given no consequences. Perhaps if everyone had refused, it would have caused problems for the Nazi leadership and perhaps even prevented the massacre.
For a lighter drama, try the miniseries Transatlantic, which tells the story of Varian Frye, a journalist who organized the rescue of Jews and others threatened by the Nazis in Vichy France in the early ’40s .
The film features many legendary artists and writers who had taken refuge in a villa owned by Frye’s friends, including Marc Chagall, Walter Benjamin, and Max Ernst.