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Can a Holocaust documentary have a happy ending? Should it?
(JTA) — Holocaust documentaries tend to sit along a scale from horrific to heartwarming. For every “Night Will Fall,” the rediscovered British film showing gruesome scenes from newly liberated Nazi concentration camps, there is a family-friendly film about a survivor, like “The Number on Great-Grandpa’s Arm.”
Some critics distrust Holocaust documentaries that have “happy” endings, or that focus on the second chance given to survivors, as if they betray the fate of the many more millions of Jews who died rather than survived. Raye Farr, the former director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, once criticized Holocaust documentaries’ “increasing inclination to go for sentimentality.”
“How Saba Kept Singing,”a documentary airing on PBS on Tuesday in honor of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is firmly on the side of uplift. It’s about Cantor David Wisnia, whose unlikely survival tale was told in a memorable New York Times article in 2019. The film’s redemptive message is clear from its first line — “I’m a lover of life,” says Wisnia — to one of its last: “You are really the proof that Hitler did not win,” he tells his grandson.
Wisnia was a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz by literally singing for his captors. Defying the perverse and inexplicable odds of the Final Solution, the former cantorial prodigy managed to live close to three years at the death camp and slave labor complex.
Perhaps as remarkable was his relationship with a fellow inmate, Helen “Tzippi” Spitzer, a similarly “privileged” prisoner who managed to stay in the Nazis’ good graces thanks to her skills as a graphic artist. Her assignments took her to places beyond the women’s barracks, where she met Wisnia, eight years her junior. Soon the two were arranging trysts in a loft where prisoners’ uniforms were stored. Fellow prisoners kept a helpful watch for guards.
Their death camp romance ended on the eve of liberation, when the Germans began emptying the camps and forced the prisoners on a series of death marches. Although David and Tzippi made plans to meet in Warsaw, life had other ideas. Wisnia eventually made it to America after the war, where he became a cantor at synagogues in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey. As for Tzippi, Wisnia wasn’t sure if she survived the war — and when he discovered the truth it set in motion the next remarkable chapter in their story.
The documentary recalls the horrors of the Holocaust — David speaks movingly about the murders of his parents and brothers in the Warsaw Ghetto, and having to stack bodies on a work detail at Auschwitz — but maintains a cautious distance. Writer and director Sara Taksler keeps the archive footage to a minimum, and when Wisnia relates his story of survival — with the help of Avi Wisnia, a singer-songwriter who accompanies his grandfather on a trip to Poland — it is usually over scenes of the camp as it looks today or black and white animation.
Still, “How Saba Kept Singing” is hardly saccharine. Grandfather and grandson are clear-eyed chroniclers of stories David told often (in 2015, he published a memoir, “One Voice, Two Lives: From Auschwitz Prisoner to 101st Airborne Trooper”). And David never takes his good luck for granted — the film is organized around his suspicion that there is a missing piece to his story of survival and that, as Avi says, “He could not have done it alone.”
About his time with Tzippi, David is both honest and discreet. “It was physical,” he admits. “She taught me everything. I knew nothing. I was a kid.”
Avi recounts the family’s shock when they first learned of their patriarch’s relationship with another prisoner at Auschwitz. “Even in the hell of a concentration camp you can still find some kind of a human connection,” says Avi.
Wisnia arrived in the United States in 1946 and lived with an aunt in the Bronx. He met his wife – the appropriately named Hope — and got work as an encyclopedia salesman and, for over 50 years, as a cantor. The couple would go on to have two sons, two daughters and six grandchildren.
As for Tzippi — it’s not giving away too much to say that she also survived the war and got married, to a bioengineering professor who eventually taught at New York University. Per the Times, the couple “devoted years of their lives to humanitarian causes.” She and David would meet again, in a reunion described in that 2019 New York Times story and heard in the documentary on audiotape. Suffice to say that David got an answer to the mystery that long nagged him: “How come I stayed in Auschwitz two and half years and never moved? How the hell can you explain it?”
The film is also saved from sentimentality by the knowledge that David is among the last living witnesses to the Holocaust, which he and Avi sadly acknowledge when discussing whether David would return to Auschwitz for the 75th anniversary of its liberation in 2020. Cantor Wisnia died June 15, 2021, at the age of 94; Tzippi died in 2018 at age 100.
Rabbi Isaac Nissenbaum, another victim of the Warsaw Ghetto, purportedly gave permission for the Nazis’ prey — and perhaps future filmmakers — to see their survival as a sanctification of life, not an occasion for guilt. “Today when the enemy demands the body, it is the Jew’s obligation to defend himself, to preserve his life,” he is reported to have said.
Avi Wisnia picks up this theme during a performance with his saba, Hebrew for grandfather.
“I honor the past, and we sing for the future,” he tells the audience. “The greatest act of defiance is to live.”
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The post Can a Holocaust documentary have a happy ending? Should it? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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One Person Killed, 14 Hurt in Blast in Iranian Port of Bandar Abbas, Iranian Media Reports
FILE PHOTO: An aerial view of the Iranian shores and Port of Bandar Abbas in the strait of Hormuz, December 10, 2023. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo
At least one person was killed and 14 injured in an explosion in the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas on Saturday, a local official told Iranian news agencies, but the cause of the blast was not known.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency said that social media reports alleging that a Revolutionary Guard navy commander had been targeted in the explosion were “completely false.”
Iranian media said the blast was under investigation but provided no further information. Iranian authorities could not immediately be contacted for comment.
Separately, four people were killed after a gas explosion in the city of Ahvaz near the Iraqi border, according to state-run Tehran Times. No further information was immediately available.
Two Israeli officials told Reuters that Israel was not involved in Saturday’s blasts, which come amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s crackdown on nationwide protests and over the country’s nuclear program.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US President Donald Trump said on January 22 an “armada” was heading toward Iran. Multiple sources said on Friday that Trump was weighing options against Iran that include targeted strikes on security forces.
Earlier on Saturday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian accused US, Israeli and European leaders of exploiting Iran’s economic problems, inciting unrest and providing people with the means to “tear the nation apart.”
Bandar Abbas, home to Iran’s most important container port, lies on the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway between Iran and Oman which handles about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil.
The port suffered a major explosion last April that killed dozens and injured over 1,000 people. An investigative committee at the time blamed the blast on shortcomings in adherence to principles of civil defense and security.
Iran has been rocked by nationwide protests that erupted in December over economic hardship and have posed one of the toughest challenges to the country’s clerical rulers.
At least 5,000 people were killed in the protests, including 500 members of the security forces, an Iranian official told Reuters.
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How a law used to protect synagogues is now being deployed against ICE protesters and journalists
After a pro-Palestinian protest at a New Jersey synagogue turned violent in October, the Trump administration took an unusual step — using a federal law typically aimed at protecting abortion clinics to sue the demonstrators.
Now, federal authorities are attempting to deploy the same law against journalists as well as protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement amid the agency’s at times violent crackdown in Minneapolis.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon, a local journalist, and two protesters were arrested after attending a Jan. 18 anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, Justice Department officials said Friday. Protesters alleged the pastor at Cities Church worked for ICE.
The federal law they are accused of violating, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE, prohibits the use of force or intimidation to interfere with reproductive health care clinics and houses of worship.
But in the three decades since its passage in 1994, the law had almost entirely been deployed against anti-abortion protesters causing disruptions at clinics.
That changed in September of last year, when the Trump administration cited the FACE Act to sue pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange, New Jersey.
It was the first time the Department of Justice had used the law against demonstrators outside a house of worship, Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division, said at the time.
The novel legal strategy — initially advanced by Jewish advocacy groups to fight antisemitism — is now front and center in what First Amendment advocates are describing as an attack on freedom of the press.
“I intend to identify and find every single person in that mob that interrupted that church service in that house of God and bring them to justice,” Dhillon told Newsmax last week. “And that includes so-called ‘journalists.’”
How the law has been used
The FACE Act has traditionally been used to prosecute protesters who interfere with patients entering abortion clinics. Conservative activists have long criticized the law as violating demonstrators’ First Amendment rights, and the Trump administration even issued a memo earlier this month saying the Justice Department should limit enforcement of the law.
But in September, the Trump administration applied the FACE Act in a new way: suing the New Jersey protesters at Congregation Ohr Torah.
They had disrupted an event at the Orthodox shul that promoted real estate sales in Israel and the West Bank, blowing plastic horns in people’s ears and chanting “globalize the intifada,” a complaint alleges.
Two pro-Israel demonstrators were charged by local law enforcement with aggravated assault, including a local dentist, Moshe Glick, who police said bashed a protester in the head with a metal flashlight, sending him to the hospital. Glick said he had acted in self defense, protecting a fellow congregant who had been tackled by a protester.
The event soon became a national flashpoint, with Glick’s lawyer alleging the prosecution had been “an attempt to criminalize Jewish self-defense.” Former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy pardoned Glick earlier this month.
The Trump administration sued the pro-Palestinian protesters under the FACE Act, seeking to ban them from protesting outside houses of worship and asking that they each pay thousands of dollars in fines.
At the time, Nathan Diament, executive director of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, told JNS he applauded the Trump administration “for bringing this suit to protect the Jewish community and all people of faith, who have the constitutional right to worship without fear of harassment.”
Diament did not respond to the Forward’s email asking whether he supported the use of the FACE Act against the Minneapolis journalists and protesters.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, a pro-Israel group that says it uses legal tools to counter antisemitism, did not express concern over the use of the FACE Act in the Minnesota arrests — and emphasized the necessity of protecting religious spaces from interference.
“The idea that ‘you can worship’ means nothing if a mob can make it unsafe or impossible,” Goldfeder wrote in a statement to the Forward. “So if you apply it consistently: to protect a church in Minnesota, a synagogue in New Jersey, a mosque in Detroit, what you are actually protecting is pluralism itself.”
Goldfeder has also attempted to use the FACE Act against protesters at a synagogue, citing the law in a July 2024 complaint against demonstrators who had converged on an event promoting Israel real estate at Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles. That clash descended into violence.
The Trump administration Justice Department subsequently filed a statement of interest supporting that case, arguing that what constituted “physical obstruction” at a house of worship under the FACE Act could be interpreted broadly.
Now, similar legal reasoning may apply to journalists covering the Sunday church protest in Minneapolis. Press freedom groups have expressed deep alarm over the arrests, arguing that the journalists were there to document, not disrupt.
The arrests are “the latest example of the administration coming up with far-fetched ‘gotcha’ legal theories to send a message to journalists to tread cautiously,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Because the government is looking for any way to target them.”
The post How a law used to protect synagogues is now being deployed against ICE protesters and journalists appeared first on The Forward.
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Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows
Pro-Hamas demonstrators in Istanbul, Turkey, carry a banner calling for Israel’s elimination. Photo: Reuters/Dilara Senkaya
About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.
Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”
For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”
JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.
Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.
In one striking example, Hürriyet published an article just one day after the attack, lauding the “resistance fighters” who carried out a “mythic” assault on the “Zionist occupying regime” and celebrating the killings.
In other cases, some journalists went as far as to portray Hamas as treating the Israeli hostages it kidnapped “kindly,” denying that the terrorist group had tortured and sexually abused former captives despite clear evidence.
“There was not the slightest indication that the Israelis released by the Palestinian resistance had been tortured,” Turkish journalist Hilal Kaplan wrote in Sabah, denying claims that the hostages had suffered brutal abuse.
“They all looked exactly the same physically as they did on Oct. 6, 2023, more than a year later,” he continued.
Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of JPPI, described the study’s findings as “deeply troubling,” urging Israeli officials not to overlook the Turkish media’s positive portrayal of Hamas and denial of its abuses.
“We must not normalize incitement and antisemitism anywhere in the world – certainly not when it comes from countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations,” Stern said in a statement.
According to the study, nearly half of the columns expressed a positive view of Hamas, while approximately 40 percent took a neutral position.
The analysis also found that around 40 percent of opinion columns mentioning Jews or Judaism contained antisemitic elements, with some invoking “Jewish capital” to suggest global power, while others compared Zionism to Nazism or depicted Jews as immune from international criticism.
For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, Turkish journalist Nedim Şener wrote in Hürriyet that global Jewish capital and control over media and international institutions had brought the United States and Europe “to their knees,” allowing Israel to carry out a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”