The Jews

Filmmakers Karen Cantor and Camilla Kjaerilff team to reveal how the Jews of Denmark managed to escape falling victim to Hitler's Third Reich.

Early Lois Weber film. Isaac and his faithful wife, Rachel, deplore that in America their children are forced to work on the Jewish Sabbath. Leah and Sam are not so strict as their parents and the old customs pall about their more American spirits. Sam is employed in a cloak house and secretly loves his employer's daughter, but she refuses to recognize him. Leah is loved by the handsome gentile floorwalker, and despite her father's objections, she marries him. Isaac orders Leah from the house. Later, the daughter of the cloak manufacturer marries an admirer and Sam is invited to the wedding. He drinks and disgraces himself, and returning home, is turned out by the heartbroken rabbi. He leaves, telling the old man that he will return when the father celebrated the Christian Christmas.

The stunning accomplishments of the Jews raise a question no film has dared ask before. How do they do it? Some of the world’s most prominent thinkers tackle a mystery shrouded in ignorance and prejudice. They tear back the curtain on a taboo and draw a startling link between a people’s achievements and the darkest hours in its history.

This documentary follows the Danish organization REFUGEE HELP, which facilitated the assimilation of Jews who fled Poland to Copenhagen via an off-season hotel boat.

This Oscar nominated documentary serves not only as a remembrance but a lesson and a warning for the future. It follows the plight of Europe's Jews during the terrifying period from 1933 until the final defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. Never before had the world seen such contempt for human life on such a grand scale, the murder of an estimated 6 million Jews, with countless others persecuted. During the 1930s a wave of national fervor swept through a tumultuous Germany; people looked for answers, and the politicians were all too willing to point the finger of blame towards the Jewish population. Few, if any, could have foreseen how the views of one man would unfold…that man was Adolf Hitler.

Georg Riha is and will remain the master of aerial shots. In this series, Riha uses aerial shots only. In shootings that took several years he flew over almost all of Austria and shows the country's most beautiful places from the aerial perspective during the course of a year.

The Life of the Jews in Palestine is a silent documentary film depicting Jews and Jewish communities in Ottoman Palestine.

Filmmaker and journalist Francine Pelletier looks at Canadian author Mordecai Richler in the context of the Jewish authors and comedians of his era—Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce and others. She explores various influences on Richler’s life and work: his childhood on St. Urbain Street, a religiously observant family upbringing and the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. It also addresses his public stance against Canadian and Quebec nationalism. This film is a treasure trove of archival footage, and features interviews with writers such as Adam Gopnik, Margaret Atwood and David Bezmozgis.

A small group of South Americans long to affirm their faith. Their ancestors - European Jews - were forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. Isolated in Catholic countries, rejected by local Jewish communities, they battle to become Jews regardless of the consequences. The Longing, set in Ecuador, tells the story of their attempt to regain their birthright. On the Internet, they have found an American rabbi committed to helping "lost Jews" reclaim their identities. He meets them in Guayaquil, where he has difficulty getting the local Jewish community's support in facilitating their conversions.

In one Vojvodinian castle, the preparations for the play that will be performed by members of the Association of the blind are in the process. The play is dedicated to the Jews from America who are supposed to come and visit the place of their ancestor's massacre in 1942, during a raid in Novi Sad. The plot was to be carried out according to the original stories of witnesses who have gone through this tragic event. However, the initiators of the show manipulate the blind people in order to smuggle bombs for Albanian terrorists.

About the Jews from Northeast Spain, one of the few world sites considered as Jewish spiritual resting places and the home of Nahmanides, a Kabbalah scholar.

At the turn of the century, Sephardic Jews fled the turmoil of their homeland to start a new life in America. Filled with interviews, archival photos and dozens of Ladino phrases, this slice of Northwest history captures their story as they arrived in Seattle and found work at the Pike Place Market.

Some extreme anti-Semitics maintain the Jews were behind 9/11, are responsible for the spread of AIDS and other diseases, and that they invented the Holocaust. The Jews are also accused of murdering babies in ritual sacrifice, and of working towards a secret goal of world domination. Journalist and commentator David Aaronovitch travels to the Middle East to find out just how widespread such views are, what the causes are, and to ask what can be done to combat such thinking. Travelling between Israel and Gaza, Aaronovitch encounters a disturbing degree of hostility among the Palestinians. A trawl through recent excerpts of Palestinian TV reveals just how much animosity there is directed towards the Jews.

This documentary depicts the creation of collective farms for Jews in Crimea. It shows them building their houses, digging a well, and farming the land.

By the age of thirty he’d already become the most famous poet in the Jewish world. He spent very few years living in Tel Aviv, but he loved the city dearly. Some 100,000 people attended his funeral in 1934. “King of the Jews” is a portrait of the most beloved Jew of his day, Chaim Nachman Bialik. Combining special animation, a voice track by Chaim Topol, rare archival footage, long-forgotten photographs, poems by Bialik performed by Ninet and interviews with the foremost Bialik researchers and fans in Israel and around the world, this film retells the story of the little boy from the shtetl, who became King of the Jews.

In 1944, at Himmler's command, a film was shot in Terezín, meant to give the impression that the rumors of extermination camps were enemy propaganda. In the film titled "The Führer Gives a City to the Jews", Terezín was depicted as a town handed over into free Jewish self-administration.

A moving documentary that illuminates the lives of a Sephardic community in Greece whose story speaks for all people who have been decimated by war and discrimination.

Romaniotes: the distinct Greek-Jewish community in the city of Ioannina, with customs and traditions that differ from those of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, whose traces are lost in the depths of time. The Romaniotes became an integral part of the cultural mosaic of the city of Ioannina since the Byzantine era, but faced the danger of extinction during the harsh period of the Second World War. Narrating their history through time unfolds not only the story of the city, but of the whole country by and large.