Living Record: Prewar Poland Preserved on Film (Center for Jewish History)
Date:
December 15, 2010
Start Time:
6:00 PM
Location:
15 West 16th Street
Description:
On the eve of the Second World War, and armed only with American passports and a color-film home movie camera, noted writer Glenn Kurtz's grandparents journeyed from New York to Poland to pay a visit to their friends and family. These rare films, shot in the late 1930s, only months before the war was to begin, offer the rarest of glimpses into a world that was soon to be destroyed.
In conjunction with the Yeshiva University Museum and YIVO exhibition 16mm Postcards: Home Movies of American Jewish Visitors to 1930s Poland, these images serve as a striking reminder of what east European Jews’ daily lives were like in the few years before the Second World War. This evening’s program will feature a screening of clips and a conversation between Mr. Kurtz; Roberta Newman, curator of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s collection of home movies; Zachary Levine, curator of the YUM exhibition; and Lindsay Zarwell, Archivist of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archives at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They will discuss the impact of these powerful images and the challenges we face today to understand and preserve the past through the artifacts that remain. These potent films serve as a reminder that, even when living memory has faded, the history and the legacy of the Jewish community so devastated by the Holocaust live on.
(Tickets required; please check website above to confirm event)
