Movies About Polish Jews

The mystical love story between Chonen, a poor Talmud student, and Lea, a girl from a wealthy family, depicts the traditional folk culture of Polish Jews before WW2.

This musical drama marks the screen debut of Moishe Oysher, in a film critic J. Hoberman calls an "anti-Jazz Singer." Oysher stars as a wayward youth who makes his way from his Polish shtetl to New York's Lower East Side where he is "discovered" and becomes a well-known singer. Ultimately, he returns home to the Old Country and reunites with his parents and his childhood sweetheart.

Jewish life in Poland before World War II. The Vladimir Medem Sanatorium stood as the embodiment of health and enlightenment in striking contrast to the grim images of urban Polish-Jewish poverty.

A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.

During WWII, acclaimed Polish musician Wladyslaw faces various struggles as he loses contact with his family. As the situation worsens, he hides in the ruins of Warsaw in order to survive.

The story of a WWII tragedy in a Polish village mixed with the story of a wedding taking place in the same place 100 years later. A bitter look at a xenophobic community that forgets its own history.

The story of a holocaust survivor, young teacher and psychologist, Lena Kuchler, who, at her early 30's established, single-handed, a home for surviving children from eastern Poland. Kuchler's children's house functioned both as a school and a clinic for physical and mental injuries. Her unique approach, which was inspired by Janush Korchack, was extremely progressive and highly experimental for its time, because the horrors it had to deal with had no precedent. Due to violent anti-Semitic attacks on the house, Lena had to flee with her 100 children out of Poland, with false passports and great danger. She crossed Europe with them, until they found a safe shore in France. She nursed the children to rehabilitation, until the founding of new state of Israel # where she resettled the children as citizens. In 1959 Lena Kuchler published "My Hundred Children", the first of her Best-seller books, that was translated into 14 languages. Her books had tremendous influence on the next generations. Lena's only child, Shira Toren testa, and eight of the 100 Children, reconstruct the dramatic and exiting story, in the real locations of the events.

A photographer journeys to his grandfather's former Polish shtetl in search of memories and how they are formed...and forgotten.

The 1941 invasion of Soviet Ukraine by Nazi Germany is shown through the life of inhabitants of a Yiddish village at the border of Poland.

A researcher meets a professor and reveals herself as the child to whom she refused to shelter during World War II.

Rebirth of the Jewish Community of Wroclaw, Poland after the fall of Communism.

A snippet of 16mm film offers an emotionally charged, meditative glimpse into the lives of the unsuspecting Jewish citizens of a small Polish village at the precipice of World War II.

Anna and Adam, a young couple from Paris with Polish Jewish origins, leave for the first time of their lives in Poland. If Adam is not very excited about this trip, Anna is excited to discover the land that is also her grandmother's.

8-year-old Srulik flees from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and attempts to survive, at first alone in the forest, and then on a farm as a Christian orphan named Jurek. Throughout his ordeal, he is in danger of losing his Jewish identity. Based on the bestseller by Uri Orlev.

Abraham Bursztein, an 88 year-old Jewish tailor, runs away from Buenos Aires to Poland, where he proposes to find a friend who saved him from certain death at the end of World War II. After seven decades without any contact with him, Abraham will try to find his old friend and keep his promise to return one day.

Berlin born Aviva Kempner chronicles her mother Hanka and uncle Dudek Ciesla's lives before and during World War II

One of the last Yiddish films made in Poland before the Nazi invasion, this film tells the story of a mother's persistent struggles to support her three children in pre-war World War II Polish Ukraine. After her family is pulled apart by severe poverty and the turmoil of war, she and her children make their way to New York and turn to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for help.

The action of the movie takes place in the thirties before the Jewish pogrom in the border town of Poland, which became a kind of emigration zone. Two teenagers - Ivan and Abram - run away from the dictates of adults into a big life.

The last Yiddish feature made in Poland before WWII, this 1939 film was based on a 1907 play by the prolific playwright Jacob Gordin. Best known for his folksy didacticism and moralism, Gordin brought the common life of the Lower East Side to the Yiddish stage. With over 100 plays to his credit, Gordin was a formative influence on modern Yiddish theater. He was so popular among theatergoers that reportedly a quarter of a million people attended his funeral in New York City. Without a Home is the story of the separation and hardships faced by immigrants in America at the turn of the century. Its touching portrayal of the hardships of immigrant life enthralled Jewish theater audiences and it became part of the standard Yiddish stage repertoire in America and Poland. The film provides a poignant and dramatic picture of a difficult era, focusing on the bleak prospects for the survival of traditional Jewish family values. When the eldest son of the Rivkin family is drowned, the father leaves his family in Europe to go to America. There he finds only financial hardship and loneliness, struggling to find a way to bring the rest of his family over. The stellar cast includes stage actress Ida Kaminska and the hilarious comedy duo, Dzigan and Shumacher, who provide a healthy measure of comic relief. The title, Without a Home, intended by Gordin to symbolize the uprooted Jewish immigrant family and by extension, the Jewish people, was a particularly poignant one for Jewish film audiences in Poland on the eve of WWII. The film underscored the growing sense among Polish Jews facing the Nazi threat and increasing antisemitism in Poland that they too might soon be "without a home."

In this, Poland's last Yiddish feature film, comedy duo Dzigan and Shumacher play all the parts in a Sholem Aleichem story staged for an audience of children who survived the Holocaust.

Michal Waszynski was buried in Rome as a wealthy Polish aristocrat. But this mysterious man, who was Poland's leading 1930s filmmaker, had a lot of secrets and directed his own life in a brilliant way.

Fictional re-enactments about the early years in Belgium of the director's parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, and scenes taken in modern Brussels in this elliptical experimental feature.

Mamele embraces the entire gamut of interwar Jewish life in Lodz - tenements and unemployed Jews, nightclubs and gangsters, religious Jews celebrating Sukkot - but the film belongs to Molly Picon who romps undaunted through her dutiful daughter role saving siblings, keeping the family intact, singing and acting her way through the stages of a woman's life from childhood to old age.

Thousands of Jewish children lived in the Polish city of Bendzin before the Holocaust. Barely a dozen survived the community's destruction. Through interviews and rare archival film and photos, this critically-acclaimed documentary tells the story of three of these children-Ada, Shulamit, and the filmmaker herself, Mira. These women recount their memories of a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis and reflect on the courage of those individuals and families who helped them survive. The film thus not only documents a tragic historical period but also examines the complexity of human nature, undermining stereotypes about the behavior of Jews, Poles, and even some Germans during the era. The film's story involves Alfred Rossner, a German businessman who, like Oskar Schindler, employed forced Jewish labor and saved Jewish lives, but who, unlike Schindler, was not a Nazi Party member and paid with his life for his actions.