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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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Four Plead Guilty in 2024 Assault of Pro-Israel Attendees at North Carolina Library Event
West Asheville Library in North Carolina. Screenshot: buncombecounty.org.
In 2024, two Jewish residents and an 80-year-old senior citizen were beaten and dragged out of a public event in North Carolina which celebrated Hamas and was organized by an anarchist bookfair. Now, almost two years later, four people have pleaded guilty in relation to those attacks at the West Asheville Library.
On Tuesday, three individuals entered a guilty plea for simple assault in Buncombe Superior Court, while a fourth pleaded guilty to resisting a public officer.
According to a local news report, “All four persons were placed on supervised probation for one year. As conditions of their probation, each must complete 30 hours of community service, have no contact with the victims, and refrain from posting about the event on social media.”
One of the Jewish victims, David Moritz, was in the courtroom during the proceedings and told me, “I am happy we got some measure of justice.”
Another person beaten that day in 2024 was Bob Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart. Campbell was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor.
Now, two shocking security camera videos have been shared which capture some of the violent assaults against the three pro-Israel attendees. Moritz told me it was this video evidence which led to the guilty pleas.
In one video, Campbell is seen on his knees with masked radicals all around him, while Moritz is being attacked.
In another video, Moritz — the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors — is seen being violently pushed out of the public library while he tries to defend himself and return to help his friends being assaulted in the building.
Moritz informed me that there were further violent aspects of the assault, which involved victims being struck multiple times, taking place in areas of the library that were not under video surveillance.
He conveyed that there were numerous additional individuals who assaulted them at the library who remain unidentified. He expressed gratitude for the diligent efforts of the local police and district attorney’s office and hopes that law enforcement will continue to pursue further suspects.
Moritz is extremely appreciative of the assistance that he and the two other victims received from StandWithUs, a prominent organization that fights antisemitism and educates about Israel. StandWithUs provided the three victims with pro bono legal support throughout the entire process and helped in identifying a suspect.
Yael Lerman, director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, told me that her organization is “tremendously proud of the victims for working tirelessly to help identify their attackers, despite the fact that many of the attackers wore masks to conceal their identities.” Lerman said she is “thrilled” they worked together to help identify the attackers so they could “bring them to justice.”
“We need to give a lot of credit to the police department and the prosecutor. They really came through,” she added.
“The victims were fearless and persistent,” Lerman continued. “One of them was in his 80s and it did not stop him from fighting back. In this day and age, a lot of people — including Jews — feel fearful. The victims in this case are wonderful role models.”
Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.
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How Moses Created an Enduring Model of Great Leadership
Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law (1659), by Rembrandt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Socrates is supposed to have said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” And he didn’t just toss out this aphorism to sound clever — he literally lived it.
One day, in ancient Athens, a group of young aristocrats gathered around Socrates, who cut a strange figure standing barefoot in the bustling marketplace. Merchants were shouting prices, craftsmen were hammering bronze, and locals bustled from stall to stall in search of what they needed to buy. And in the middle of all this noise stood Socrates, asking questions.
One confident young man, eager to show off his intellect, stepped forward to challenge him. Socrates asked him a simple question: “Tell me, what is courage?” The young man gave a polished answer — something about bravery in battle.
Socrates nodded thoughtfully. Then he asked another question. “But what about the courage of someone who endures hardship? Is that courage, too?”
The young man paused for a moment, then adjusted his answer. Socrates asked another question. And then another. Each time the young man tried to refine what he had already said.
Within a few minutes, the initially confident student who started out with such bravado suddenly realized something uncomfortable: The more he tried to define courage, the less certain he became that he understood it at all.
Socrates smiled. He had not humiliated the young man. Nor had he delivered a lecture explaining the answer. Instead, he had done something far more powerful: He had made the student think. For Socrates, teaching was never about pouring knowledge into passive listeners. It was about awakening curiosity, provoking reflection, and guiding his students to discover the truth for themselves.
Incredibly, Socrates left behind no books at all. His ideas survive entirely through the students he inspired — most famously, Plato, whose own student, Aristotle, would go on to tutor Alexander the Great.
This concept was not unique to Socrates; a similar pattern appears in the history of medicine. Hippocrates is remembered as the father of medical practice; his name is associated with the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical pledge physicians have taken for centuries.
But Hippocrates’ greatest achievement was not a single medical breakthrough, but the creation of a teaching tradition. His true legacy was a lineage of physicians who refined and expanded his ideas.
Hippocrates understood that medical advances would not come from one brilliant doctor, but from generations of practitioners who shared their knowledge with those who followed.
Centuries after Hippocrates, the same philosophy reappeared in the career of one of the founders of modern medical education, the great Canadian physician William Osler. In the 19th century, much medical training still took place in lecture halls, where students memorized facts from textbooks.
Osler believed that this approach fundamentally misunderstood how doctors are made. “Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom,” he insisted. At Johns Hopkins he transformed medical education by bringing students directly into hospitals to observe patients, diagnose illnesses, and learn from real cases. His influence spread through the countless physicians he trained, many of whom went on to become leaders in medicine themselves.
This tradition of multiplying knowledge, rather than hoarding it, also lies quietly at the heart of Parshat Vayakhel. After the trauma of the Golden Calf, the Jewish people are given the opportunity to rebuild their spiritual life through the construction of the Mishkan. It is an enormous national project — architecturally complex, artistically demanding, and seemingly beyond the scope of a recently liberated nation of former slaves.
One might therefore assume that Moses, the towering leader who brought them out of Egypt and delivered the Torah at Sinai, would oversee every detail of the project. But that is not what happens. Instead, Moses steps back and appoints a master craftsman, Betzalel, to lead the work.
Alongside him is Oholiav, and together they assemble a team of skilled artisans described by the Torah as people whose hearts were filled with wisdom and whose spirits were inspired to contribute. Curiously, Moses does not micromanage the process. Instead, he empowers others to build.
It is a remarkable moment. The leader of the Jewish people — the man through whom God speaks — understands that the Mishkan will never become a national spiritual center if it is simply the project of one man. It must become the creation of an entire people.
And so, Moses does something that many leaders struggle to do: He lets others lead. Because the ultimate leaders understand that their true legacy is not what they build with their own hands, but what they inspire others to build with theirs.
Moses’ greatest achievement here may not have been the Mishkan itself, but rather the establishment of a model of leadership that nurtures a new generation of leaders and builders. This same model would guide Jewish history at one of its most fragile moments.
When the Romans stood on the brink of destroying Jerusalem and the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, it seemed as if the spiritual center of Jewish life might disappear forever. The Temple had stood at the heart of Jewish religious life for centuries. Without it, the future looked bleak.
At that moment of crisis, the leader of Jerusalem’s beleaguered community, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, understood something essential. The survival of Judaism would not depend on rebuilding stones and walls once they were gone. It would depend on building the next generation of Jewish leaders.
With this in mind, he had himself smuggled out of the besieged city and asked the Roman general Vespasian to allow him to establish a new center of learning in Yavneh. Vespasian agreed, and after the destruction, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai began teaching a remarkable group of students.
The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot records their names and their individual strengths with unusual care: Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah, Rabbi Yose HaKohen, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, and Rabbi Elazar ben Arach. Each possessed a different temperament and intellectual strength, and each would go on to shape the next generation of Jewish scholarship.
Like Moses, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had his eye on the future. He set about creating the scholars who would carry Judaism forward after the Temple was gone — and after he himself was gone. From Socrates in Athens, to Hippocrates in the early days of medicine, to William Osler in the hospitals of modern universities, the pattern repeats itself across history: The greatest mentors do not simply teach. They create teachers.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of Moses’ leadership in Parshat Vayakhel. His example — like that of Socrates, Hippocrates, and Osler — shows that the measure of great leaders is not in what they build alone, but how they empower and inspire future generations to build and lead.
Moshe did not merely build a sanctuary in the wilderness. He created a model of leadership that empowered others to build alongside him. Which is why, for posterity, he is not known as King Moses or Priest Moses — but Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher.
Because the greatest leaders do not leave behind monuments. They leave behind people who know how to build them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Apartheid Week Exposed: Combating a Vicious Anti-Israel Lie on Campus
An “Apartheid Wall” erected by Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Photo: X/Twitter
On a sundrenched corner of coastline, a light breeze dances across the blue waves. But what seems pleasant at the surface, ideal even, is hardly the full story. To the side, a metal sign reads: “Under Section 37 of the Durban Beach by-laws, this bathing area is reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group.” The city is Durban, the third-most populous city in South Africa, and this scene was commonplace under its erstwhile apartheid regime. “Apartheid,” Afrikaans for “separateness,” was a brutal system of legally enforced racial segregation that dominated Africa’s southernmost nation until being finally abolished in 1994.
But what does this faraway land have in common with Israel? According to the anti-Zionist movement, a heck of a lot. To compare this former regime to the anti-Zionists’ warped version of the Jewish State, they even hold an annual ritual of “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) in protest of the latter’s continued existence. This canard is being legitimized at the very top, with California Governor and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom recently going so far as to assert that many observers are “appropriately” describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” What was once a fringe preserve of college radicals is now being increasingly indulged by the mainstream.
In reality, aside from those sunny beach fronts, Israel has precisely nothing in common with the racist regime that stained South African society for far too long. Under Israeli law, racial discrimination is illegal, and previous surveys suggest that 80 percent of Arab citizens prefer living there than anywhere else. Arab-focused political parties are elected to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and people of all backgrounds hold prominent roles across all sectors. Israeli Christians, the majority of whom are Arab, are an upwardly mobile minority over-represented across law and computer science subjects.
Such facts would not have been simply unlikely in apartheid South Africa, but completely out of the question. Non-white South Africans could not even legally sip coffee in the same cafe as their Caucasian compatriots, never mind hope to seek employment or excellence in the same fields or pursue friendship or relationships.
When confronted, Israel’s detractors dismiss these facts, which disprove their apartheid slur, as “strawman” arguments, and move to claim instead that military courts, checkpoints, building restrictions, administrative detention, or alleged “Jewish-only roads” are evidence of “apartheid.”
The allegations are false — Israelis of all religions share the same roads — or at best specious. Where residents under the Palestinian Authority are prevented from roads used by Israeli Jews and Arabs, it relates to jurisdiction and security responsibility, not race or religion. During the Second Intifada, roads were repeatedly used for ambushes, drive-by shootings, and roadside bomb attacks targeting Israeli civilians: Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or otherwise. Security restrictions were introduced to separate civilian traffic from known attack corridors, which significantly reduced the frequency of attacks. Checkpoints and military courts, too, arise from an unresolved territorial conflict and ongoing security concerns, not a policy of racialized segregation.
This organized intellectual assault on Israel’s existence is nothing new. “Apartheid Week” was launched in 2005 and has been an outlet for misinformation and lies ever since. While the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aids it brands itself as “grassroots,” it enjoys swathes of establishment backing. NGO Monitor has exposed how various governments, the European Union, and anti-Zionist groups like the New Israel Fund routinely help pay for and publicize groups responsible for such campaigns on campus and beyond. It is therefore up to the rest of us to put up a veritable opposition to their tempting babble.
Naturally, there will always be a core of hardline activists unwilling to interrogate their own prejudices, but plenty of ordinary students have simply never heard another side to the story. Many young people also feel intense social pressure to accept flawed anti-Zionist talking points. Giving such students the space to hear a new perspective can help them interrogate and form their views in a more constructive environment. This is what the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)’s sixth annual “Apartheid Week Exposed” campaign, and our work all year-round, seeks to encourage at this critical juncture.
This week, our campus program will partner with “Israel-is” to host a campus speaking and tabling tour across Florida and California. The program will feature two speakers with firsthand perspectives on the Middle East. In Florida we will host Neriya Kfir, an Israeli Oct. 7 survivor and former IDF soldier, and Padideh Daneshzad-Moghaddam, an Iranian speaker who grew up under the Islamic Republic and will share insights into her life in her home country and the aspirations many Iranians have for freedom. Then in the Golden State, Staff Sergeant Dean Cohen and Farriba, an activist born in Mashhad, northeast Iran, will take the reins.
We have already, and will continue, to hold similar educational events with students across the US and around the world. We are also providing students with helpful myth-busters on Israel and the Middle East, offering them the factual grounding to help them navigate what may feel like a lonely university experience.
We seek to elevate voices that you are not likely to hear on campus. IAW and its allies routinely celebrate the tyrannical theocrats responsible for massacring peaceful protestors, abusing women, and organizing terror around the world, atrocities they both bizarrely celebrate and continue to deny. IAW activists seemingly place little value on any human life deemed to get in the way of their anti-Israel aims. This year, and in previous ones, various campus groups are using IAW to rally for the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison. In 2004, he was convicted on five counts of murder for the deaths of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk.
Students in America and beyond — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or otherwise — deserve a better future. One in which constructive dialogue replaces name-calling and intimidation. Administrators, for their part, should also make clear that the university does not endorse the claims made during these partisan campaigns and should enforce standards of conduct when activism crosses into harassment or violence. It is certainly a big ask, but we can only hope for such a change if we help to build it.