Adult Access Programs

Written by admin on February 8th, 2010

Access at The Jewish Museum is an aspect of my position here that has introduced me to various communities of visitors who are eager to come to this and other museums. They are audiences who are excited that our institutions are working to facilitate more enjoyable learning experiences for all visitors.

Gradually, we are making more and more of our museum experiences accessible to a range of people who in the past may not have been able to fully experience the Museum. For example, we recently published a tactile graphic book based on the Museum’s permanent collection which has been successfully integrated into our touch tours. Our touch collection, objects which visitors can handle, combined with the tactile book, a combination of raised drawings and information in Braille, are used together to create a multi-sensory experience, one enjoyed by a growing number of visitors with visual impairments.

Tactile Book: Ken Aptekar's I Hate the Name Kenneth, 1996

Soon after the publication was finished, a group of visitors who had visual impairments scheduled a touch tour. We were excited to integrate this new tool into the touch tour, as both the tactile book and the touch collection help illustrate and make concrete aspects of Jewish art and culture explored in Culture and Continuity, the Museum’s permanent exhibition. Throughout the program, the group was enthusiastic and engaged, taking time to feel the rough textures of a pottery fragment or smell the spices used in a Jewish ritual. What better way to learn about a culture than to be able to hold an ancient oil lamp while examining ideas, history and objects of Jewish life?

Scheduling and Access Coordinator

Accessibility at The Jewish Museum

Written by admin on February 5th, 2010

When I tell people that I develop access programs at The Jewish Museum, they often do not know exactly what to think. One architect friend recently asked if I work to ensure that the museum building complies with national design standards, such as providing wheelchair-accessible entrances and restrooms. Others have asked if I help create signage and guides for visitors who are blind and partially-sighted, or if I make art with seniors. The real question is: how am I making the museum accessible, and for whom?

As School Programs Coordinator at The Jewish Museum, I oversee Access Programs for students, teachers and families – meaning I create tours, workshops and multi-session programs to engage visitors with developmental, cognitive and physical disabilities through discussion, movement, art-making, writing and even sometimes music. This year, we are partnering with two special education schools to bring students with autism and emotional disturbances to visit our Alias Man Ray exhibition and make multi-media artworks inspired by everyday objects. We are also offering professional development sessions for special education teachers about engaging students with art, literacy and history along with weekend workshops where families with children who have special needs can explore the museum and make art together. And on February 21st, for the first time ever, we are collaborating with The Museum of Modern Art to develop an afternoon of art-viewing and art-making for adults with development or learning disabilities.

Sometimes, teachers or parents that I speak with are hesitant to bring their children with disabilities to The Jewish Museum – or museums in general – because they think museums are not for them. However, within the past few years, museums have greatly expanded their programming and accommodations for visitors with special needs in an effort to diversify audiences and make institutions accessible to all. After our last Access Family Workshop, one parent said that it was one of the best museum experiences they’d ever had with their child [on the autism spectrum], and that they didn’t realize he could actually make it through a tour. If you don’t give a try, you’ll never know…

School Programs Coordinator

Tobaron Waxman is the winner of The Jewish Museum’s first-ever Audience Award

Written by admin on January 29th, 2010

The first transgendered artist to be exhibited in a major Jewish museum exhibition has won the Audience Award for the favorite work in the exhibition Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life.

Tobaron Waxman is the winner of The Jewish Museum’s first-ever Audience Award, selected from nearly sixty international artists. Votes were gathered from visitors to the exhibition in person and online, between September 13, 2009 and January 11, 2010. Waxman was selected for his provocative installation Opshernish, 2000/2009. The piece examines the construction of gender in Judaism by recreating and condensing a multi-part performance installation.

During the original performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000, Waxman sat on a stool for 5 hours, focused and silent, his waist-length hair twisted into locks, clamped with metal brackets and pulled tightly upwards to the ceiling with airplane cable in a typical white-walled art gallery. Gallery visitors could approach him to be handed a pair of scissors, and clip one of the locks, freeing it from tension, allowing it to swing away from the artist and float between his head and the ceiling. By the end of the performance, a virtual forest of over two dozen locks hung suspended. The performance saw this interaction repeated using electric clippers and finally razors, until gallery visitors had shaved Waxman’s head bald. The suspended locks, cut hair, stool and cutting implements remained as an installation in the gallery. Several months later the final phase of cutting with clippers and razor was performed again for three hours, on the last day of the installation. For Reinventing Ritual, Waxman and our installation crew recreated the Opshernish installation to be encountered as though the performance had just ended.

Opshernish took inspiration from the observant Jewish practice opsherin, a ritual first haircut that initiates three-year-old boys into religious observance and study. Although most of the hair is shorn in keeping with secular or worldly male appearance, the peyot, or sidelocks, may be kept long in accordance with Jewish law. Waxman referenced this ritual as a personal act of agency-causing the viewer to ask what creates gender, and how. The artist wrote, “My opsherin facilitated an exodus from an infancy of self-awareness and away from kinship-based models of identity formation altogether.” Just as Jewish boys pass from a female world to a male world with their first haircut, so too did Waxman mark the poignancy of transition with the intensity of ritual.

At The Jewish Museum, Opshernish consists of human hair, airplane cable, mending brackets, barber’s scissors, clippers, razors, chrome bowls. A real-time, eight-hour video documents the entire decade-long cycle of the work, from the initial pre-performance preparations to the reinstallation in New York.

The exhibition remains on view until February 7, and will travel to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, opening April 24.

Related Post: Installing Tobaron Waxman’s Opshernish

“Ajami” in the running for Best Foreign Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences

Written by admin on January 26th, 2010

Updated, February 2, 2010:
Ajami has been officially nominated  for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for the 82nd Academy Awards.
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The New York Jewish Film Festival has learned that Ajami, which screened twice to a sold-out crowd at the Walter Reade Theater earlier this month, has been shortlisted for best foreign film at the Oscars.

Co-directed by Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti and his Israeli collaborator Yaron Shani, Ajami presents a story about the complex relationship between Jews and Arabs in Israel and the Occupied Territories, a relationship that is often painful, but one that teaches a lesson.

Ajami reflects the reality of the current state of Israel and humanizes a story that we often hear exclusively from journalists. The film’s constant contrast of emotions and skill for storytelling make it a strong contender for this year’s Academy Awards.Ajami premiered in New York at the New York Jewish Film Festival to a thrilled audience of hundreds. Directors Copti and Shani, both young and devout filmmakers, have collaborated on their first feature film in what is bound to unfold into a long-lasting partnership.

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500.

The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.

Related Links:

Watch the trailer for Ajami in Hebrew.
Watch the trailer for Ajami in Arabic.
Ajami’s Facebook page for American audiences.

A message from Adam Elliot, writer & director, “Mary and Max”.

Written by admin on January 25th, 2010

A message from Adam Elliot that was read out before the New York Jewish Film Festival 2010 screenings of Mary and Max:

“Hello Jewish Cinefiles and Lovers of Quality Plasticine Films!

My name is Adam Elliot and I am the writer and director of the film you are about to see, Mary and Max.  Sadly due to geographical and financial restraints, I cannot leave Australia and be with you tonight in New York. What you are about to see is a five year labour of love involving a crew of over one hundred and a budget that was miniscule and pathetic! Every prop, set and character you are about to see has been handcrafted and there is not one single frame of computer generated imagery in the film! The film has touched audiences around the world and I hope will also make you laugh and cry. Whatever you think of my plasticine blobs, I truly thank you for coming tonight and supporting independent films like mine. Your attendance is very important to me and without it lone voices and stories about difference will cease to be heard. Enjoy and long live plasticine and all things Jewish!” - Adam Elliot.

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500.

The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.

Related Links:
TJM Blog: “Mary and Max” with Director Adam Elliot

Adam Elliot’s Website

Mutual Understanding in ‘Gevald!’ and ‘Eyes Wide Open’

Written by admin on January 23rd, 2010

Among the impressive line-up of films at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival are two of many films that deal with pressing social issues. Both Gevald!, a documentary that delves into the lives of anti-Zionist Hassidic Jews, and Eyes Wide Open, a story about homosexuality within the ultra-Orthodox, raise questions and prompt needed discussion.

“Extremism exists in all religions,” says Rachel Chanoff, NYJFF committee member, about the film Gevald!. “When we think of the term ‘mutual understanding,’ we think of it on the warm and fuzzy end. There are ways of understanding each other from our not-so-pretty commonalities.”

Gevald! presents the lives of two of Israel’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox leaders, Shmuel Chaim Pappenheim, an anti-Zionist radical activist who organizes mass protests against the secular state, and the late Avraham Ravitz, a former IDF soldier and a longtime Knesset member who worked within the system to advance his constituency’s religious agenda.

While the characters are extreme,” says Chanoff, “we are able to see their humanity and they can be viewed as both protagonists and antagonists.”

Chanoff also hails the film for presenting the subject from an objective standpoint, something difficult to accomplish in filmmaking.

Eyes Wide Open also deals with a critical issue that is regularly taking up newspaper headlines. The film presents the story of two ultra-Orthodox Jews who pursue their passion for one another under the glaring radar of religious friends and family.

“It is something that is beyond frowned upon in Orthodox circles … yet is part of the Jewish experience,” says Chanoff. “The film provides a platform for conversation about issues that are so relevant in every society today.”

Gevald! will screen with Chronicle of a Kidnap at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center at the following times:
Mon Jan 25: 1:00pm
/    Mon Jan 25: 6:15pm

Eyes Wide Open will screen with Kallah (Bride) at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center at the following times:
Sat Jan 23: 6:30pm
/ Sun Jan 24: 6:00pm

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500.

The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.

“The Peretzniks” with Director Slawomir Grünberg

Written by admin on January 21st, 2010

Documentary filmmaker  Slawomir Grünberg describes in an exclusive interview with the New York Jewish Film Festival what it was like to gather together alumni of the Jewish Peretz School who fled from Lodz,  Poland as a result of the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign.

NYJFF: What led you to the decision to produce The Peretzniks?

Grünberg: The events of March ‘68 are still somewhat obscure in Poland and remain relatively unknown or remembered outside of Poland. At the same time almost completely unknown to the outside world is the fact that there was Jewish life in Poland after the War. A quarter million Jews lived in Poland at its peak just after World War II and more then 30 thousand prior to 1968. There were Jewish schools, clubs, and theaters; there were Jewish summer camps and the Jewish family life. It was a proud society with a will not only to survive, but to flourish.

When I learned about the phenomenon of the Peretz School in Lodz, Poland, whose graduates are dispersed over all the continents and still meet regularly like one big family, I knew that this was a story for documentary. In the film I wanted to addresses the complexities of Jewish existence in post-war Poland under the Communist regime and the life and death of the Peretz  School was my vehicle to carry this story. By focusing on the bittersweet memories of young Jews in post-war Poland I also wanted to understand what binds the Peretzniks together and how do they deal with the country of their birth, which all of a sudden didn’t want them anymore.

NYJFF: Can you describe what it was like to get everyone together after all of these years?

Grünberg: The Peretzniks meet regurarly in Ashkelon, Israel and Warsaw, Poland. They meet privately at family events, birthdays and Bar Mitzvahs. As a film director, I didn’t have to make a big effort to bring them together, it happened naturally. At the same time filming my characters was a lot of fun because all of them were very open to the camera and were motivated to share their stories with me. I did over 100 interviews, something unheard of in documentary filmmaking. I felt that besides making this film, I had a rare opportunity to preserve a piece of history, a history so easily forgotten.

NYJFF: How has the film been received so far?

Grünberg:  The Polish premiere of the film was in August 2009 in Lodz, Poland as part of the Lodz 65th Anniversary of Liquidation of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and it was a big success. A couple of days later the film was shown in the Jewish Theater in Warsaw, again with a full audience and standing ovation.

NYJFF:  How have the Peretzniks got along since the shooting of the film?

Grünberg:  The Peretzniks enjoy the film screenings, which gives them another occasion to get together. In the process of making this documentary we found the school archives and to some extent we were able to share it online. Hundreds of photographs from that time got circulated over the Internet. Many new Peretzniks resurfaced as a result of the film screenings and were added to the website http://www.perecowicze.com/and to Facebook, where the Perecowicze site has over 100 fans. For some of them the Premiere screening at the Walter Read Theater will be an occasion to meet their schoolmates after nearly fifty years.

The Peretzniks will screen at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites:  TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500. The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Director Michael Verhoeven on his film “Human Failure”

Written by admin on January 19th, 2010

Michael Verhoeven, director of the jaw-dropping documentary Human Failure, describes his own sense of shock as he learned how much was stolen from the Jews during the Third Reich. Even ordinary Germans, he says, could not believe that many of their parents and grandparents may still use furniture and live in homes sold to them by Jews and at auctions, for irregularly low sums. In an exclusive commentary for the New York Jewish Film Festival, Verhoeven describes his personal quest for the truth in an otherwise heavily guarded secret.

Commentary by Michael Verhoeven
My documentary premiered at the Hof Film Festival in November 2008 and with great response. It was aired twice on German public television late in the evening, as is common with films of that genre. Then the film was screened in the Munich Forum Theatre for four weeks. During Q&As, people seemed to feel guilty and ashamed even being in the third generation and absolutely not guilty themselves (When I address younger people, I avoid the term “guilt”).

My film does not deal in the main parts with what is understood as the so-called “Aryanization,” because this topic is quite well known in my country by now, such as the takeover of warehouses, shops and firms (for instance Kempinski, Hertie, Neckermann and so forth). My film deals with unknown facts. The most surprising fact is that the Nazis decided to punish the Jewish Citizens for Kristallnacht, after non-Jewish Citizens had destroyed warehouses and restaurants, etcetera. But the most absurd explanation for the crimes of Kristallnacht, which included burnings of synagogues, was that the Aryans were gradually angered by their presence, by the presumed well being and wealth of the Jews, that the non-Jewish Germans had no other choice but to destroy their shops in the streets as a spontaneous reaction. The Nazis wanted to punish the Jews by paying atonement.

The German finance officials took over. They invented new taxes that were easy to enforce. It wasn’t the Nazi organizations, such as the Gestapo, SS or SA, that organized the greatest robbery ever, but the finance officials, who were not even necessarily Nazis. And their neighbors acquired the various assets during auctions.

How was it possible to hide the responsibility of the Finance Department after the war? It was possible thanks to a new law, which mandated that all “tax files” be kept locked up, even though these respective files were not “tax files” but rather documents with records of the state robberies. Every Jewish family had to write down all their belongings (their bed sheets, pots, dishes, shoes… everything, even children’s toys) well before Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, which is proof that all was planned long before.

The topic of my film is new and the reactions were strong, but positive. Some people protested by saying that the non-Jewish Germans were desperate from being bombed and needed furniture and clothes. But most people in the audiences were ashamed by the sudden awareness, that most probably their inherited vases, silver and jewelry had been stolen during the process of the so-called Aryanization.

I was also invited to show my film in schools to children between the ages of 13 and 19. I was surprised at their knowledge of the Third Reich. One boy said after watching the film that he would talk to his grandmother to see if she had something that belonged to Jews, and bring it to the Munich Jewish Museum, which collects those items.

After my film the former German Finance Minister, Peer Steinbrück, installed a commission of historians to investigate the involvement of finance and tax officials during the Holocaust. In the meantime, we had an election and I’m not sure whether the new Finance Minister, Mr. Schäuble, will dare to go further into it.

I knew about the Aryanization of shops and firms and I knew about families who acquired homes from Jews who had to leave Germany and had to sell their property quickly and under pressure. The buying and selling of properties was documented in the so-called “Grundbüchern” (register for landed property), with each and every detail, including prices that would determine how much the seller was allowed to keep and how much he had to leave to the state.

After the war the Allies looked into these books and tried to organize additional payments to the former owners, which, of course, could not succeed in many cases. I myself have exactly such a case in my family. My parents told me about it when I was a boy. They had to pay compensation to the former owner of our house in Berlin, after the war. This became an important topic of discussion in the 1950s between my parents and us children. My parents sold the house in the late 50s for less than what they paid for it. I see this as some kind of injustice. But I would have made my film anyway, whether of not this happened to my family.

I made the film because I had heard about the exhibition of a certain Professor Dressen in Düsseldorf, who took 2,000 of these files secretly from the Cologne  ”Finanzpräsidium” (Presidency of Finance), copied them, returned them to the office and then showed the copies to the public. He was first invited to show the exhibit at the Humboldt University in Berlin, which was cancelled after Professor Dressen refused to blacken all names on the lists. I got in contact with him and decided to do a film on this subject, because it was absolutely new to me and presumably also to the public.

Human Failure will screen at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center at the following times

Thu Jan 21: 1:00pm
Thu Jan 21: 6:15pm
Tue Jan 26: 4:00pm

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500. The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Related Links: Human Failure’s website

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.

“Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” with Producer & Director of Research Vincent Brown.

Written by mscanlon on January 17th, 2010

Melville J. Herskovits, a Jew struggling to define his own identity, pioneered African-American studies into the growing field of research that exists today, and greatly influenced the way we identify ourselves. In an exclusive interview, Vincent Brown, producer and director of research of “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” and a Harvard professor, talks to The New York Jewish Film Festival about the inspiration behind this illuminating documentary.

NYJFF - Several debates are currently taking place around the ideas of whether someone is Black or African American, from information circulated by press to ideas being promoted by film stars. How does the film deal with this debate? How much of an influence did Herskovits have in leading to debates such as this one?

Brown - One of the things that attracted us to the story of Melville J. Herskovits was that whenever people talk seriously about the African origins of black cultural practice, if you follow their sources, they eventually lead you to Herskovits’s research.  He is more responsible than any other North American for putting the question on the agenda: how African is black culture in the Americas? His body of work has helped to provide a seemingly scientific guarantee for claims about the Africanness of African-America. What turned out to be most interesting, however, was that Herskovits’s research was related to his personal journey as a scholar of Jewish ancestry, and as a result, so too is the very notion of African America.

“Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” suggests that the story of how so-called Negroes came to be called African-Americans is intertwined with the story of how Jews became white people.  In the twentieth-century United States, even the ways many Jews and African-Americans understood themselves was entangled. Through his research and writing, Herskovits shaped African-American self-knowledge.  At the same time, he became socially “white,” rather than particularly Jewish, by assuming the authority to speak about and in some instances for black people.  This is a reminder that debates about identity are never (and never could be) conducted wholly within a group.  This is how histories of identification work; we so often see ourselves through the eyes of others.

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this.  But the story of how a white man of Jewish ancestry acquired the power to re-make the historical understanding of black people should make us conscious of an important fact: the way we think about belonging is embedded in struggles over who has access to the most influential means of expression and the capacity to shape the terms of a public conversation.  If some people have more power to sway a debate by virtue of their social status—as in the case of Herskovits then, or perhaps popular hip-hop artists now—we always want to ask, to what end?

NYJFF - The film influences common stereotypes about race. How are modern-day stereotypes influenced by the work of anthropology?

Brown - It may be that, these days, anthropologists have too little influence over they way people talk about culture.  Franz Boas and his students, Herskovits among them, conceived of culture as a way of analyzing patterns of learned behavior without recourse to nineteenth-century racial science. They did this partly in order to undermine the intellectual credibility of crude stereotypes that biology determined behavior, and that human destiny was determined by racial type.  But now you have all kinds of writers who use culture largely to do the same work that race used to perform.  People talk about culture as destiny, rather than about the importance of social and political history.  E. Franklin Frazier, one of Herskovits’s toughest critics, worried about exactly this problem.

Having more anthropologists in the public debate might unsettle the kinds of vague generalities encompassed by the word culture, which so often leads to smug and simple explanations people’s predicament in the world—“culture of poverty” and “clash of civilizations,” to name two examples. Rather than explaining our world with stereotypes, we could follow the example of anthropologists like Michel-Rolph Trouillot and think more specifically about “how human thought and behavior is patterned and how those patterns are produced, rejected, or acquired.”

NYJFF - Perhaps you could speak generally about the goals of the film, and what you tried to bring across in your contribution.

Brown - We wanted to contribute to a conversation about the politics of ideas and introduce audiences to an important figure of whom very few people outside of academe will have heard.  We also wanted people to see how histories of Jewish and black self-understanding intertwine in Herskovits’s intellectual biography, how ways of looking at the histories of seemingly distinct peoples are themselves the products of deep and inextricable entanglements.

One thing that we all agreed on was the need to find visually compelling ways to tell complicated stories about ideas.  The director Llewellyn Smith and executive producer Christine Herbes-Sommers have been doing this in their filmmaking for some time, which is one reason I approached them with the idea. They make films about the history of ideas as visually exciting as popcorn thrillers—at least to me, anyway!

But I also wanted to see if we could bring the rigorous standards of academic research and interpretation to television documentary without alienating a non-academic audience.  I had conducted five or six years of research in libraries and archives before we started working together, so I was hopeful that we could produce a film that scholars would respect as much as the audiences would enjoy.  Actually, the response to the film has been more enthusiastic than I ever could have hoped.

Vincent Brown is Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. His webpage can be found at http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/brown.php.

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness will screen with Leon Blum: For All Mankind at the following times:
Mon Jan 18: 12:30pm
Tue Jan 19: 8:45pm
Wed Jan 20: 3:30pm

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500.

The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.

U.S. Premiere of ‘Saviors in the Night’ kicks off The New York Jewish Film Festival

Written by admin on January 15th, 2010

“I will leave this film a changed person” said one audience member of Saviors in the Night, a German World War II drama about the lives of German farmers harboring Jews during that country’s darkest of periods.

Telling the story in German, by Germans and for Germans proved one of the trickiest feats, recalls the Amsterdam-born director, Ludi Boeken, whose own parents survived thanks to the bravery and hearts of farmers.

Marga Spiegel, on whose life the story is based, told of the difficulties she and her husband faced as both Germans and Jews. “My husband spoke not a word of English,” said Mrs. Spiegel in response to a question from the audience. “It was difficult to know where to go after the War.”

Actors Margarita Broich, Lia Hoensbroech, and Veronica Ferres, who plays Marga, spoke of the inspiration they acquired during the shooting of the film, and the constant challenges they faced recounting the horrors of their country’s past. “My grandparents could survive the War because of farmers,” recalled Ms Hoensbroech, “which presented a great challenge and an honor to take part in this film.”

Invited guests left the packed theater filled with emotion and gratitude for the director and his cast.

Saviors in the Night, which premiered Tuesday night in the U.S., at The New York Jewish Film Festival, will begin a tour to over 30 film festivals in the coming months. The Jewish Museum was delighted to receive such distinguished guests at Opening Night, including several members of the cast, which has set the stage for a remarkable 2010 Festival.

The Festival program and ticket links are available on both websites: TheJewishMuseum.org and Filmlinc.com. Tickets can also be purchased in person at the Walter Reade box office, or by calling CenterCharge at 212.721.6500.

The dates of The New York Jewish Film Festival are January 13-28, 2010.

Entries about the 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival are written by  Jaron Gandelman, Film Festival Intern, at The Jewish Museum.