Under a British law in Palestine passed in 1930, Jews were forbidden to blow the shofar at the Kotel, pray loudly there, or bring Torah scrolls, so as not to offend the Arab population.

Despite this restriction, for the next seventeen years, the shofar was sounded at the Kotel every Yom Kippur. Shofars were smuggled in to the Kotel where brave teenagers defiantly blew them at the conclusion of the fast. Some managed to get away – others were captured and sent to jail for up to six months.

Six of these men are still alive.

Two weeks ago, these six men returned to the scene of their “crime”. Armed with shofars, they recounted their individual stories and blew shofar again at the Kotel.

This is their powerful and inspiring story.

Announcing his new idea Rabbi Miller wrote: “In this go, go, go world we live in, it can be difficult to sit down and find time to study the weekly parsha. And when shabbos rolls around, we all wish we had studied more and could contribute to the conversation at the shabbos table. Not to mention our children, don’t we all wish we could provide them beautiful insights into the weekly parsha?”.

‘Torah in Ten’ is now available not only from a computer.  Asked by Jewish iPhone Community and many more iPhone users Kol Menachem kindly agreed to change the format of presentation so that weekly portion of  ‘Torah in Ten’ was available to be watched on iPhone’s/iPad’s screens. Nu, now then, what kind of excuse will you come up with?

Torah in Ten will take place every Thursday, for ten minutes. Let’s sum up with Rebbe’s words: “Our task is solely to illuminate the world with the light of Torah, Judaism and Chassidus”.

Shabbat Shalom

Your weekly “Torah In Ten” videocast by Rabbi Chaim Miller – Parshas Nitzavim/Vayelech

Ushpizin

Plot – Moshe and Mali Bellanga are an impoverished, childless, Hasidic baal teshuva (“returnees to Judaism”) couple in the Breslov community in Jerusalem. After Moshe is passed over for a stipend he expected, they cannot pay their bills, much less prepare for the upcoming Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Moshe admires a particularly beautiful etrog, or citron, one of the four species required for the holiday observance. They console themselves by recalling a saying of Rabbi Nachman of  Breslov that difficult times are a test of faith. After some anguished prayer, they receive an unexpected monetary gift on the eve of the holiday and Moshe buys the etrog for 1000 shekels, a large sum of money that is much more than he can afford. The couple is visited by a pair of escaped convicts, one of whom knew Moshe in his earlier, non-religious life. The convicts become their guests (ushpizin) in the sukkah, creating many conflicts and straining Moshe and Mali’s relationship.

While a few scenes were shot in Haredi neighbourhoods, most of the film was shot at the Schneller Orphanage and Jerusalem’s Nahlaot neighbourhood.  Several streets in Nahlaot feature frequently in the film: Rama Street (where Ben-Baruch meets Moshe and offers him the Sukkah, and where Moshe and Malli part), Zichron Tuvyah (where Moshe’s Yeshiva is located) and Tavor Street, while others appear less frequently or even in single shots. The stone buildings of  Nahlaot substitute for the Shmuel Hanavi area, though landmarks such as the Wolfson Towers and the Yad Labanim building reveal the true location.

The film received mostly positive reviews, and was described as a heart warming tale for the holidays, much like the American Christmas movies.  Michal Batsheva Rand’s performance won many praises, being her first performance on screen.

The film was a box-office success, becoming one of the most financially successful Israeli movies of 2005.  It attracted many religious and Haredi viewers who normally do not go to the cinema.

The film was not directed at the Haredi film consumer, since Haredim do not go to movie theatres. Nonetheless, it attracted much attention and this led to heavy downloading and piracy of the movie from people who otherwise had no access to see the film. After inquiries from people who had watched unauthorized copies of the film asking how to pay, pashkvilen were put up in Haredi neighbourhoods. The advertisements told the public of the financial problem that resulted from the piracy, a reminder of the prohibition against stealing and included apost office box and telephone number in which to pay with a credit card. Another way to repay the makers of the movie was to call up movie theatres, order tickets, and not show up.

The film was nominated for three Ophir Awards and Shuli Rand won for Best Actor. In his speech, he thanked G-d and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. The film was also nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Shaul Mizrahi.

Cast

Shuli Rand as Moshe Bellanga
Michal Batsheva Rand as Malli Bellanga
Shaul Mizrahi as Eliyahu Scorpio
Ilan Ganani as Yossef

Announcing his new idea Rabbi Miller wrote: “In this go, go, go world we live in, it can be difficult to sit down and find time to study the weekly parsha. And when shabbos rolls around, we all wish we had studied more and could contribute to the conversation at the shabbos table. Not to mention our children, don’t we all wish we could provide them beautiful insights into the weekly parsha?”.

‘Torah in Ten’ is now available not only from a computer.  Asked by Jewish iPhone Community and many more iPhone users Kol Menachem kindly agreed to change the format of presentation so that weekly portion of  ‘Torah in Ten’ was available to be watched on iPhone’s/iPad’s screens. Nu, now then, what kind of excuse will you come up with?

Torah in Ten will take place every Thursday, for ten minutes. Let’s sum up with Rebbe’s words: “Our task is solely to illuminate the world with the light of Torah, Judaism and Chassidus”.

Shabbat Shalom

Your weekly “Torah In Ten” videocast by Rabbi Chaim Miller – Parshas Ki Savo

Late Summer Blues

They all experience different conflicts about joining the army. One of them cannot join the army because he is diabetic. One of them does not want to join the army because he is a pacifist. Another is conflicted between joining an elite group in the army like his older brothers and joining the army band like his new girlfriend. A fourth is excited to train to be a paratrooper when he is killed in training.  As a result of his death, his friends change their high-school graduation play, and launch a protest musical.

New York Times: “The film has the episodic structure and small scale of cinema verite, and the narrative frame of a home movie. Each major character has a section named for him. Yossi, known as Joe, is inducted into the Army even before the graduation ceremonies take place; he writes in his diary that he regrets he has not had time to ”get a driver’s license or sleep with a girl.” Three weeks later, he is dead, killed in an accident during training.

Arileh spray paints ”Stop the War of Attrition” on every wall he can find. Mossi, the musician, decides they should dedicate the graduation play to Yossi. ”A protest show! It’ll be terrific!” he says, and the movie audience is forced to sit through a song and dance number that owes everything to ”Hair.” Margo, an aspiring film maker and a diabetic who is exempt from the draft, wanders through ”Late Summer Blues” filming his friends. There is too little difference between his home movies, inserted throughout, and the rest of the film.

When Margo looks back three years and says in the final scene, ”I can’t believe that’s how we were – so stupid, so beautiful, so pure,” he offers the perspective that should have informed the film all along. Without it, Yossi’s diary is merely familiar and banal, Arileh’s rebellion seems anachronistic and Mossi’s show naive (…).

The single triumph of  ”Late Summer Blues” is its acting, most by students and amateurs, who are so realistic that the film often feels like a documentary about ingenuous young people.”

Your weekly “Torah In Ten” videocast

Rabbi Chaim Miller is a leading international authority for interpretation of Jewish Bible and mysticism, specifically the Torah-related works of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (1902-1994). His scholarly achievement, at the tender age of 37, is substantiated by the vast dissemination of his works, as well as the acclaim they have won him among his colleagues and in the educational and religious communities in which the works circulate.

Born and raised in London, England, Miller studied at the prestigious Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Boys. He began to explore the depth of his religion while at England’s Leeds University through extensive reading and personal introspection.

Fascinated by Jewish mystical teachings in particular, he took a year off to learn at a Lubavitcher yeshiva.

Five years later he was an ordained rabbi practicing in Leeds, running both a synagogue and a yeshiva, and writing in his spare time what would soon become the Gutnick Chumash.

In 2004 Rabbi Miller relocated to the United States with the intention of devoting himself almost entirely to the writing and editing of great Jewish liturgy for Kol Menachem.  Since this time he has completed the groundbreaking Kol Menachem Chumash (Gutnick Edition), the Slager Edition Haggadah — the bestselling work in its genre — and two volumes of a landmark series exploring Rambam’s Thirteen Principles of Faith.

Rabbi Miller’s texts are currently used at some of the nation’s top institutions,  including New York University and Yeshiva University. In addition, over 1,000 rabbis in the United States use Rabbi Miller’s texts to teach their students and prepare their sermons.

Rabbi Miller’s publications have received the attention of community leaders and various persons of note. In 2008, President George W. Bush sent the Slager Edition Haggadah to the troops in Iraq as a representation of the Jewish faith for the United States military. TheHaggadah was a recent recipient of the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award just this past year, and Miller’s Gutnick Chumash is on display at the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn, New York. The popular “Dummies” series published The Torah for Dummies in 2008, with author Arthur Kurzweil singling out Rabbi Miller’s Gutnick Chumash and proclaiming, “If I could have only one translation on a desert island, it would be this one.” (source: Torah In Ten website)

Torah in Ten – Parshas Ki Seitzei - is brought to you by Kol Menachem.

After a minor car crash, the headstrong Judah and other Jewish youths who patrol as vigilantes confront Scratch, a mouthy African-American hustler.

Passengers in the cars make eye contact: Sol, a hip-hop musician, songwriter, and artist (Scratch’s friend), and Sara, who is betrothed to Judah but wants to go to college and be on her own. Over the next few days, while Scratch and Judah’s conflict escalates in violence, Sara and Sol connect in ways that echo Sheba and Solomon.

The friendship puts them in danger.

Reviews

This is an independent film about forbidden love and the ensuing violent cultural clashes between Brooklyn’s African-American and Jewish Communities. The storyline is somewhat predictable, but the film’s musical score, detailed cinematography, and suprisingly decent acting make it a worthwhile watch. The chemistry between the main characters Sol (Tariq Trotter) and Sara (Karen Goberman), was not entirely believable, and the acting by the secondary actors could have used some touching up. Allusions to Ancient Babylon and King Solomon’s Empire put an interesting twist on the story. You will see visually spectacular footage of  Brooklyn’s Carribean Festival (a kind of Mardi Gras celebration). If you’ve never seen or heard the Roots perform, you are in for a treat. They present an evocative style of Hip-Hop, without relying on those played out themes (i.e. money, sex, violence). The sound they create is truly organic and full of musical integrity. Yes, we’ve seen forbidden love stories before, but none quite like this (Amazon: Tom Murray).

* * *

I find it shocking that almost everyone saw this as a retread of the Romeo & Juliet or West Side Story kind of forbidden love tale when the device the plot actually hinges on is the Biblical Song Of Solomon and the Ethiopian legend of Solomon & Sheba. The story and plot follow the story told in the Song Of Solomon much more than they do Romeo & Juliet. As a Jewish man, who happens to be a hip-hop artist, that is married to a Jamaican Rastafarian Brooklynite woman, maybe I found this story just way too irresistable.

No Brooklyn Babylon isn’t a cinematic classic, but it beats almost everything else geared towards the young urban demographic with it’s intelligence & relatability (Amazon: nazaright)

This movie, at first glance, seemed promising. A sort of Romeo & Juliet thing with a Crown Heights spin on it – but it falls far short of its mark.

The protagonist is 1st generation American Rastafarian, and ends up romancing a Hasidic girl, informally engaged.

I’d give the story a 2 or 3 if it ended there. But the story, overly simplistic to begin with, was compounded by the negative stereotypes scattered throughout the movie. Clearly, the director, Marc Levin, has had no contact with Hasidism. Or if he has, he has had only negative interactions. We are not shown a single sympathetic figure in the entire Hasidic enclave, except for maybe the grandmother, who dies  - coincidentally, the night that the girl and boy have pre-martial sex- a BIG Hasidic no-no.

The Hasidism are portrayed as pushy thugs, who stop at nothing to get what they want, be it sex, marriage, or revenge.

The other side is just as oversimplified. We are shown several Bob Marley caricatures – old men in dredlocks hanging out in the back of their stores, smoking marijuana and spouting hippy-istic nothings- but nothing of real substance.

The narration is absurd – someone rapping about what we’ve just seen and making fake rap sounds with his mouth as an interlude.

The ending is nonexistant- the boy is rapping his “masterpiece” about Brooklyn Babylon- hence the title- and we see a bunch of clips throughout the movie of him and the girl. The final shot is the girl pusing a bi-racial baby in a stroller. No resolution at all, when in real life there would have been so many more issues to it!

The different families’ reactions to the relatioship, for one:
Will Sol (the black boy) convert? Is Sara (the jewish girl) going to leave her community? Nothing. We don’t even know if they get married.

Very dissapointing.

Hasidism have to suffer so many slings and arrows of indignity in films- either they are nonexistant backdrops, or warped caricatures – see “A Price Above Rubies” if you don’t believe me.

You’d think a Jewish director would have at least attempted to get it right.

I give this film half a star for some interesting background on Rastafarianism and 1 star for portraying a black protagonist as intelligent- possibly this film’s only saving grace. (Amazon: Andrew Nussbaum)

Surrounded by a barbed wire topped 10 foot high brick wall, it was into this tiny corner of the Polish capital that the Nazis herded up to 400,000 Jewish prisoners at a time; systematically starving them with barely 181 calories of rations per day,  leaving them to die of  hunger or disease or simply leaving them to languish while they unknowingly awaited shipment to Hitler’s gas chambers.

It was here too that in the spring of 1943, a small band of heroic Jewish fighters launched a desperate uprising against their Nazis captors, a battle that ended only when the overwhelmingly powerful German forces leveled the ghetto and reduced it to rubble.

Yet barely a year before, In May 1942 — two and half years after the Warsaw Ghetto was established and shortly before the Nazis sent the Ghetto’s first 300,000 Jews to the extermination camp of Treblinka — the Reich dispatched a crew of German soldiers to film Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Their perverse propaganda goal: to record for posterity examples of the religious practices and “sub-human culture” of the soon to be eliminated judische Rasse,  everything from a circumcision ceremony to a burial service;  from the extreme poverty of the many to the supposed lack of concern of those few Jews who still had some assets.

Parts of this nefarious Nazi propaganda film were heart wrenchingly real; the Nazis had no compunction about showing Jews suffering. But other parts of it were carefully staged, a  German Potemkin Village movie honed for propaganda and construed to discredit the Jews.

Horrifying snippets of it have appeared over the years:  a starving child dying on the streets of the  Ghetto while other Jews walk by or still others dine on meals at well stocked restaurants that never existed’ Nazi appointed Jewish Ghetto police brutalizing fellow Jews.

Yet mysteriously the Nazis’ propaganda film was never finished.  For more than 50 years, the silent, unedited reels lay hidden in a secret East German film archive in boxes marked simply, “The Ghetto.”

Then along came Yael Hersonski, a young Israeli documentary maker whose own grandmother had survived the Warsaw Ghetto. After gaining access to the long abandoned footage via the current German government, Hersonski wrote and directed  A Film Unfinished, a staggering 90 minute documentary of the atrocities of  life in the Warsaw Ghetto as filmed by the Nazis themselves.  It is presented in America by the New York distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories .

Two-thirds of the 31 year old Hersonski’s film consists of the original  Nazi propaganda footage – including out-takes. The rest is comprised in part of the wrinkled faces of a handful of  Warsaw ghetto survivors grimly watching an actual screening of the film and offering commentary (some clearly remember the Wermacht cameramen at work).

Using an actor, Hersonski has also re-enacted the actual post-war testimony of one of the film’s original German cameramen (now deceased).

But in this viewer’s mind, the most fascinating parts of the unfinished film are its out-takes which at times clearly show the cameramen themselves caught in the shot (see photo at beginning of piece) or demonstrate how scenes were staged, then re-shot to produce a “better” anti-Semitic result.

A Film Unfinished has already won well deserved international plaudits It was the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Winner for World Cinema Documentary Editing, the 2010 Hot Docs Winner for Best International Feature and a prime selection at Germany’s 2010 Berlinale.

Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished” will open on August 18th in New York at The Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street) and Lincoln Plaza (1886 Broadway), on August 20th It premieres in Los Angeles at The Laemmle Royal and in Encino, California at Laemmle Town Center. This will be followed by a national run of the film.

For some obscure reason, the Motion Picture Association of America – which lets our youth be bombarded by meaningless entertainment and violence – has decided to give A Film Unfinished an R rating because of “disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities, including graphic nudity,” the latter in a Nazi-coerced scene of young women in a ritual bath.

The rating, which prevents anyone under 17 from watching the film unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian, will not block the commercial screening of the film.  But it will prevent the film from being shown in high school classes as an educational tool, to the particular disappointment of its creator Yael Hersonski who looks barely 17 herself and says she made it “not only for now but for future generations.”

This incredibly powerful film is a must for everyone.

This article originally appeared at huffingtonpost.com: “A Film Unfinished: The Warsaw Ghetto As Seen Through Nazi Eyes” by Richard Z. Chesnoff

Official website

“Once I  was”

Set in 1968, an Israeli born teenage boy gets a summer job with a Holocaust survivor who makes ends meet by brokering marriages and smuggled goods.

The matchmaker’s office is located in the back of a rundown movie theater, run by seven Romanian dwarfs (true story!!!) who were saved from the gas chambers by the infamous Doctor Mengale. The dwarfs run nothing but romantic Indian movies in the theater, and may or may not be aware of the illegal goings on in the back.

Throughout the summer, the mysterious matchmaker takes the boy on a dangerous coming of age ride into the deepest and darkest urban underbelly of  Six Day War Haifa – where love assumes surprising shapes and forms and history is transformed into mythology  (source: praxisfilms.co.il).

* * *

Once I Was is a coming-of-age drama about a boy,  Arik (Tuval Shafir), growing up in a middle-class household in Haifa in 1968.

“It’s about the encounter of Israel with the summer of love,” says Nesher. “After the victory in ’67, there was a sigh of relief. And there was a shift from a focus on survival to an interest in life.”

Arik becomes interested in his best friend’s beautiful cousin Tamara (Neta Porat), who has grown up in America but is spending the summer here. “She talks about rock’n’roll, free love – even though she doesn’t really understand it – and women’s rights.” In an era when the Beatles were refused entry by the Interior Ministry, which did not want to encourage young people to listen to rock music, “this is fascinating for a boy like Arik.”

Arik’s father is a Holocaust survivor, although he never discusses his experiences. “I know this kid intimately,” says Nesher of his hero, although he insists the film is not autobiographical in any strict sense. Arik goes to work for Yankele (Adir Miller), a Holocaust survivor and matchmaker who describes himself as “someone who specializes in special cases.” Yankele works in what the movie calls “the Lower City,” the downtown area around the port at the bottom of the hill, where Yankele and others dealt in contraband goods, prostitutes solicited openly and gambling went on in otherwise quiet buildings.

There, Arik meets Yankele’s clients and friends, including Sylvia (Bat-El Papura), a dwarf from a group of seven dwarves who were experimented on by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz and who moved to Haifa and started a movie theater that only showed love stories. This strange plot thread is based on a true story that Nesher had long been fascinated by. As Arik spends time in the Lower City, he begins to think more and also to understand more about the Holocaust.

“I knew nothing about my father as a young man, or my mother as a young woman. My mother only spoke about her experiences last year, and not to me, but to my children, on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Back then, as the new generation of Israelis, we were the ones put in charge of making sure this never happens again. The Holocaust was very fresh in people’s minds and it was a very difficult subject for me, and really for almost all Israelis, to deal with. It was something so terrifying and we were filled up with those slogans, ‘Never Again,’ ‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter,’” he recalls (read more in Jerusalem Post).

The Producers

The Producers was the first film directed by Mel Brooks, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay.

This Mel Brooks’ directorial debut is still after ten movies he directed afterwards one of  his very greatest, cleverest and wittiest comedies ever. It’s a masterpiece and perhaps the funniest film of the late 60’s. Merely the basic idea of  ”The Producers”  is already hilarious enough. Theatrical producer Max Bialystock (played irresistibly by splendid Zero Mostel) finds out that with a bit of dishonesty the producer could actually make more money with a flop than he could with a hit. In order to make this scheme reality he teams up with his new friend Leo Bloom (always terrific Gene Wilder) and starts to look for the worst play ever written.

They end up choosing a play called “Springtime for Hitler” – highly questionable musical written by a fanatic Nazi jerk Franz Liebkind, a lunatic German nutcase who never seems to take off his helmet. Of course they also hire the worst and the most ungifted man they can find to direct the play, quite a personality Roger De Bris – a bloke who just seems to like wearing dresses. Naturally they find an old hippie Lorenzo Saint Dubois (or just LSD to friends) to play the part of Adolf Hitler. They are ready to vouch for the fact that the play is going to be as catastrophical as it possible can be. If all this sounds funny that’s because it simply is so damn funny, in many scenes even hysterically funny.

Finally the play “Springtime for Hitler” starts out with a shocking song and the dubious lyrics contains parts like “Springtime for Hitler and Germany, Winter for Poland and France” and “Bombs falling from the skies again, Deutschland is on the rise again“. I have to give you a serious warning. Want it or not, this foolish little song is annoyingly catchy so the possibility that it will stick in your head and you still hum or sing it few days later is always there and you can imagine where it could lead. Script is so ingenious it’s basically a work of art and acting is widely spectacular. Zero Mostel is marvelous and master comedian Gene Wilder’s performance once again extremely convincing (“I don’t like people touching my blue blanket”).

Kenneth Mars was an exquisite choice to play the part of the Nazi jackass Liebkind and Christopher Hewett handles the role of the director Roger De Bris enjoyably (“That whole third act just got to go. They’re losing the war…it’s too depressing!”). Dick Shawn is also superb in the role of LSD, one the best moments of the film was when he performed the unexpectedly humorous song “Love power” (great parody of a typical hippie, especially considering that “The Producers” was released in 1968). Overall “The Producers” is a magnificent comedy, a masterpiece that just gets better every time you watch it. At least I can’t help of loving a movie that makes the Nazis look ridiculous.

Overall “The Producers” is a magnificent comedy, a masterpiece that just gets better every time you watch it. At least I can’t help of loving a movie that makes the Nazis look ridiculous  (source).

In 1998 Whitwell Middle School principal Linda M. Hooper asked Sandra Roberts to begin a Holocaust Education class that would be the basis for teaching tolerance in a voluntary afterschool program.  Sandra Roberts held the first class in the fall of 1998. Soon the students were overwhelmed with the massive scale of the Holocaust and asked Mrs. Hooper if they could collect something to represent the lives that were exterminated during the Holocaust. Mrs. Hooper responded that they could if they could find something that related to the Holocaust or to World War II. Through Internet studies, the students discovered that Johan Vaaler designed a loop of metal, that he was Jewish, Norwegian, and the Norwegians wore them on their lapels during WWII as a silent protest against Nazi policies.

The students decided to collect 6,000,000 paper clips to represent the estimated 6,000,000 Jews killed between 1939 and 1945 under the authority of the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. At first the project went slowly, as it did not gain much publicity. Students created a website and sent out letters to friends, family and celebrities. The project began to snowball after it received attention from Peter and Dagmar Schroeder, journalists who were born in Germany during World War II and who cover the White House for German newspapers. They published some articles as well as a book, Das Büroklammer-Projekt (The Paper Clip Project,) published in September 2000, that promoted the project in Germany. The big break in the US came with an article in the Washington Post on April 7, 2001, written by Dita Smith. After the article, many more paper clips were being sent.  Soon, millions of paper clips started to flood the school.

The documentary film about the project was officially released in 2004. Joe Fab of The Johnson Group, who eventually became the producer, director, and writer, initially started to think about making a movie.

However, it looked more like a story for a TV magazine. He filmed as several Holocaust survivors from New York visited the school and shared their experiences with the community at a church. Out of this footage, he made a raw seven-minute presentation. With help from Ergo Entertainment and its partners Donny Epstein, Yeeshai Gross and Elie Landau (who joined the project as executive producers), this “demo” helped to convince the Miramax film company that this project was worth a full-length movie. It was described as not yet another movie showing the tragedy, but a project of  hope and inspiration.

The movie features interviews with students, teachers, Holocaust survivors, and people who sent paper clips. It also shows how the railcar traveled from Germany to Baltimore, and then Whitwell.

The creators had accumulated about 150 hours of footage. The movie was shown for the first time in November 2003 in Whitwell.

Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Foer, a young American Jewish man, goes on a quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather during the Holocaust in a small Ukrainian town called Trachimbrod that was wiped off the map when the Nazis liquidated Eastern European shtetls. His guides are a cranky, anti-semitic grandfather, his deranged Border collie, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., and his over-enthusiastic grandson, whose fractured command of  English, passion for American pop culture, and constant chatter threaten to make the worst of every situation. But what starts out as the tour from hell turns into a meaningful journey, with an unexpected series of revelations that will change all of their lives.

Everything Is Illuminated’s score features eight original tracks composed by Paul Cantelon, along with songs by Russian ska punk band Leningrad, Arcady Severny, Csókolom, Tin Hat Trio and Gogol Bordello, whose lead singer plays Alex. The band members of Gogol Bordello play the band in the train station where the character Alex has come to meet his US client, Jonathan Foer. DeVotchKa’s single “How It Ends” is featured in the trailer, but not in the official soundtrack (source).

A young Jewish American flies to the Ukraine in search of his grandfather’s past. He has a photograph and the name of a village. He hires the Odessa Heritage Tours, made up of a gruff old man and his English-speaking grandson. The three, plus grandfather’s deranged dog, travel in an old car from Odessa into Ukraine’s heart.  Jonathan, the American, is a collector, putting things he finds into small plastic bags, so he will remember. Alex, the interpreter, is an archetypal wild and crazy guy. Alex asks the old man, “Was there anti-Semitism in the Ukraine before the war?” Will they find the village?  The past illuminates everything. (IMDb)