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With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories
(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States.
On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class — how to use a Palestinian story?”
Kashua was smiling on Zoom as he said it — he is, after all, known for his often fatalistic sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the author had given his blessing for Kolirin to make an adaptation of his novel “Let It Be Morning,” and said he loved the final result.
But like most jokes, this one had a kernel of truth: Israel’s two most recent Oscar submissions, hitting New York’s Quad Cinema within a week of each other, both — to varying degrees — tell Palestinian stories.
“Let It Be Morning” is a dark comedy about an Arab Israeli village that has suddenly and with no explanation been cordoned off from the rest of the country by the Israeli military. This event forces its Palestinian residents, including a protagonist trying to return to his comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem, to reckon with how their dignity as citizens has been denied to them by the mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. At the Quad, the film is accompanied by a retrospective of Kolirin’s work, including “The Band’s Visit,” the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical; the retrospective is sponsored by the Israeli consulate in New York.
The all-female cast of “Cinema Sabaya,” a mix of Jewish and Arab actresses, in a film directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
The following week will see the opening of Rotem’s film, “Cinema Sabaya.” It follows a group of eight women, some Jewish and some Arab and Palestinian, who bond with each other while taking a filmmaking class in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera. Cast member Dana Ivgy, who plays the class’s instructor, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the filming experience “felt like how living in Israel should feel,” adding, “We have more women in the film than in the Israeli government.”
Stylistically, the two films couldn’t be more different. “Let It Be Morning” is a tightly plotted narrative with boldly realized characters; almost all of its dialogue is in Arabic. “Cinema Sabaya” is a loose, heavily improvisational piece that is almost entirely set in one room, and is mostly in Hebrew (although in one tense early scene, the characters debate whether to conduct their class in Hebrew or Arabic). One is a dry, Kafkaesque satire; the other is an intimate, naturalistic drama.
But together, the films provide a snapshot of the delicate dance Israeli filmmakers must perform in the current climate. On the one hand, these art-house directors are being feted on the international stage for their empathetic storytelling that incorporates or even centers entirely on Palestinian characters. But on the other, they’re being attacked by government officials for their perceived insufficient loyalty — and their films’ very status as “Israeli” is being questioned, too, sometimes by their own cast and crew.
“Everyone can call it what they want,” Rotem said of her film. “I’m an Israeli and it’s in Israel, but I have partners who call themselves Palestinians, and some of them call themselves Arabs, and each one defined herself. I think it’s really how it should be.”
“A film does not have an identity,” Kolirin insisted in an interview with JTA. “It is a citizen of the screen.”
Eran Kolirin accepted the award for Best Director for “Let It Be Morning” at the 2021 Ophir Awards in Tel Aviv on October 5, 2021. (Tomer Neuberg/ Flash90)
Kolirin isn’t a fan of the label “Israeli film” in this case, even though that is how “Let It Be Morning” was categorized at its 2021 Cannes Film Festival premiere; its own press notes also list Israel as the “country of production.” That Cannes screening took place shortly after Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas that killed more than 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and around a dozen Israelis. The events turned Cannes into a political firestorm when the film’s Palestinian cast refused to attend the premiere.
“We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry into Cannes under the label of an ‘Israeli film’ when Israel continues to carry its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and apartheid against us — the Palestinian people,” the cast’s statement read in part.
“Each time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship,” the statement continues, calling on “international artistic and cultural institutions” to “amplify the voices of Palestinian artists and creatives.”
Kolirin himself supported the cast’s action. He knew they were grieving over the outbreak of violence in Gaza and didn’t want to put themselves in a situation where “some politician is going to wave a flag over their head or whatever.”
What’s more, he said, the status of “Let It Be Morning” as an “Israeli” film, despite the fact that around half the crew was Palestinian, was not his decision: “The film was not submitted to Cannes as an Israeli film,” he said. “You know, you fill in the form: ‘Which were the countries that gave money?’” In this case, the answer was Israel and France.
Most of the cast later did not attend the Ophir Awards ceremony, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars voted on by its filmmaking academy, where “Morning” won the top prize (which automatically made it Israel’s Oscar submission for that year). In solidarity at the awards, Kolirin read aloud a statement from his lead actress, Juna Suleiman, decrying Israel’s “active efforts to erase Palestinian identity” and what she called “ethnic cleansing.”
Orit Fouks Rotem (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Cinema Sabaya” hasn’t played host to as much offscreen controversy, but its vision of Israeli multiculturalism is still inherently political. Rotem’s mother is a local government adviser on women’s issues in Hadera, and the film was inspired by her experience participating in a photography class designed to unite Jewish and Arab women. Rotem herself later led filmmaking classes in a similar vein as research for “Sabaya.”
In the film, Ivgy’s character, who is modeled on Rotem, instructs her class to film their home lives, while secretly hoping to make a movie from their efforts. When her desire to do so is revealed, the women in the class feel betrayed: They thought they were just making films for themselves, not for their stories to be told by someone else.
Similarly, Rotem said that working with Arab and Palestinian actresses made her “aware to the fact that I can’t really tell their story.” Her solution was to allow the performers — some of whom are well-known activists who had to think twice about appearing in an Israeli movie — to voice their own opinions, and to establish the necessary trust to allow them to be unscripted on camera.
She theorizes that “Cinema Sabaya” has been so well received in Israel because “it doesn’t say ‘occupation, occupation, occupation.’ It says ‘humanity,’ so people are less afraid.” (She also noted that, in real life, the women who attended her filmmaking classes bristled at her initial suggestion to make a documentary about them, telling her to fictionalize their stories instead — which she did.)
Lately the Israeli government has a tendency to view its filmmaking class as agitators unworthy of national support, particularly when they make films criticizing the occupation. Former Culture Minister Miri Regev often disparaged films she thought were bad for Israel, including celebrated international hits such as “Foxtrot” and “Synonyms.” Her current successor, Miki Zohar, has already threatened the makers of a new documentary about the West Bank city of Hebron, saying the movie smears the military and that the directors might have to return government funds.
In recent years, Israel’s culture ministry has pushed two new controversial proposals: a grant program earmarked for those who make films in settlements, which are considered illegal under international law; and a form pledging not to make films “offensive” to Israel or the military that filmmakers would be required to sign in order to apply for certain grants, which many directors have likened to a loyalty oath. For years, some of the country’s largest grantmakers have required applicants to sign a form promising to represent their projects as Israeli on the national stage.
There has also been an effort among some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government to end funding to public broadcaster Kan, which the country’s film industry views as another attack on its free expression.
“Kan has all this dialogue,” Ivgy said. “It has Jewish and religious and Arab and Palestinian, for kids and for grownups. And nothing is taboo there. I feel that it’s very dangerous to close that option down.”
Many Israeli filmmakers are fighting back. Hundreds, including Kolirin and Rotem, have refused to sign the ministry’s pledge, and many have also protested the settlement grant program. Nadav Lapid, one of the country’s most celebrated and outspoken directors, harshly critiqued government restrictions placed on his own work in the 2021 drama “Ahed’s Knee,” which went on to win a special prize at Cannes.
Kolirin said he had recently been on a call with several Israeli filmmakers looking to further organize against artistic restrictions, and that it had given him hope. “I had this feeling of some optimism, which I didn’t have for a long time,” he said. But he didn’t mince words when discussing Israel’s new governing coalition, which he likened to “a circus of mad dogs unleashed.”
Rotem said that the current government is “very, very bad and scary,” but that it has only strengthened her resolve to make political films.
“For me, it’s also political to show women in Israel in a deep way: I mean Arabs and Jews,” she said. “Because I don’t think there are enough films that are doing that.”
For Kashua, a veteran TV writer and opinion columnist, the question of identity in Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking is even more pronounced. After a long career of trying to write about the Palestinian experience in Hebrew as a way of reaching Israelis, he left Israel for the United States in 2014, becoming discouraged by an incident in which Jewish extremists burned a Palestinian teenager alive as revenge after Palestinian terrorists kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Now based in St. Louis, he has worked as a writer and story editor on Israeli series that center on both Palestinian and Jewish stories — including the global hit “Shtisel,” which focuses on haredi Orthodox Jews, and its upcoming spinoff, along with “Madrasa,” a young-adult series about a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school.
Israeli filmmakers choosing to center Palestinian stories can be its own radical political act, Kashua believes. He noted that the dialogue in “Morning” is almost entirely in Arabic, a language that Israel demoted from national language status in 2018 — doubly ironic as he had deliberately chosen to write his original novel in Hebrew.
“The idea that this film is ‘Israeli’ — it really contradicts the idea of Israel being a purely Jewish state,” Kashua said. He added that, while he had initially hoped a Palestinian director might have adapted his novel, he was ultimately happy with Kolirin’s approach.
“I truly love the movie, and it’s barely Orientalist,” he joked, echoing Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s famous book about how a Western lens on Eastern cultures can be reductive and harmful. “Which is a big achievement for an Israeli filmmaker.”
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In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims
(JTA) — Two people lean down from an abstract version of a rail car. Their outstretched hands reach towards a family gathered around the car’s opening. The adults on the ground reach back, either to get help stepping into the car or to say good-bye.
That’s one side of the artist rendering of what will be a Holocaust monument. On the other side, train tracks lead to the entrance of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. A message across the top reads, “They were here. We remember.”
The sculpture by artists David Wilson and Stephen Hayes, called “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” is emotional on its own. But what makes the project planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, especially noteworthy is what will be alongside it.
Charlotte is the planned home for what its organizers believe is the first memorial plaza in the United States to both honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember the Holocaust in the same space. The Circle of Humanity: Monuments for Unity and Remembrance in Marshall Park will feature the 8-foot bronze statue of King currently in the park plus the new Holocaust monument.
Linking the two will be paved walkways, educational reflections and digital resources on the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and the combined history of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. School and tour groups will take part in interactive educational experiences.
To those who might wonder why these monuments belong together, Rabbi Ya’aqov Walker points to a common inheritance. “You could just describe it plainly: white supremacy in continental Europe and white supremacy in the southeastern United States,” said Walker, who is Black and serves on the project’s education committee.
The groups also share deep resilience and desire for change, he said, which led to a significant Jewish presence in the civil rights movement in the United States 20 years after the Holocaust.
“It was very prescient in their minds, from King to any major civil rights leader who was committed to nonviolence, to study and learn what the Jewish experience was, and to build relationships with rabbis as fellow spiritual leaders,” said Walker, who co-leads the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance.
The new monument will replace a small one dedicated in 1979 that’s hidden in overgrown foliage. Project partners include the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, Mecklenburg County, Queens University of Charlotte, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP.
After a national search for artists that yielded 57 design proposals, a review committee narrowed the choices to eight finalists. Wilson and Hayes, who are Black and live in Durham, North Carolina, were one of two teams asked to submit their concepts. Though they had never designed a sculpture based on a Jewish theme, they were compelled by its juxtaposition to the King monument, “creating a broader dialogue about injustice, courage and the consequences of hatred,” Wilson told county commissioners during a recent public meeting.
David Wilson, left, and Stephen Hayes are the designers of “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” the winning design for the Circle of Humanity memorial in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. (Courtesy Circle of Humanity)
Their presentation moved Commissioner Leigh Altman, who is white, to reveal that her great-grandparents and many of their children were murdered in the Holocaust. About 25 to 30 Holocaust survivors live in the Charlotte area today.
“This shared partnership for me is a reminder across one of history’s worst genocides and the worst legacy of what America has done wrong, and brought it together to find a commonality, which was a failed obligation to recognize the humanity of others and to fight for it,” she said.
The second finalist team, Miriam Gusevich and Sal Pirrone from Washington, D.C., envisioned an abstract sculpture with thousands of silver circles to represent those killed by the Nazis. The proposed structure opened to a skylight in the shape of a Star of David. Members of Gusevich’s family died in the Holocaust.
“Circle of Humanity” organizers held 12 community feedback sessions, including at synagogues, a Black church and Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black university. About 850 community members participated. More than 100 completed written surveys on their preferences. Ultimately, a majority favored the rail car image. At one session, participants audibly gasped when “In Transit” was revealed.
It’s yet to be determined which materials will be used to render the piece. Options range from cast and fabricated metal to large-scale 3-D printing. What likely won’t change is the sculpture’s bronze hue and structure.
“The skin tones can be interpreted in many ways, and it looks very similar to an auction block” used in the trafficking of enslaved people, Walker noted. He recalled that during a feedback session at a Black church, some church members teared up to see the reminder of family separation.
Urban Design Partners in collaboration with Groundworks Studio will develop the plaza, in a design called “Woven Histories.” Potential elements include a stone walkway with a plaid design. The plaid pays tribute to the dress that civil rights pioneer Dorothy Counts-Scoggins wore on the day in 1957 when she faced down an angry white mob to become the first Black student to attend a segregated high school in Charlotte.
The plaza will include benches and may incorporate decorative stone books. Like the monument design, the concept is still open to changes based on additional community feedback. The planned budget is just under $1 million, including a $100,000 endowment for programming and maintenance. If fundraising efforts are successful and the timeline stays on track, the plaza is scheduled to open in May 2027.
Marshall Park has particular resonance as the setting. It is part of the former Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal. More recently, Marshall Park has been a familiar site for protests and political demonstrations.
The idea for the innovative combination began with a discussion between Rev. Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NACCP, and Rabbi Judy Schindler, Sklut professor of Jewish studies at Queens University of Charlotte and executive director of Spill the Honey, a national non-profit which produces arts and educational materials intended to empower the Black-Jewish alliance to combat racism and antisemitism.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, created by renowned sculptor Selma Burke, was dedicated on April 5, 1980. (Courtesy Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts)
“It all came out of the same conversation, looking at the Civil Rights movement, looking at the rise in racial slurs and antisemitism, and just really understanding that we have to do something to elevate the importance of not only our cultures, but what love would look like in this country,” Mack said. “I thought it was important that we went back to the root of the civil rights movement, which was us collaborating.”
She acknowledges a few phone calls from members of Charlotte’s Black community who expressed concern about the collaboration in light of the war and political divides opened after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Others were unclear about the benefits of bringing the two histories together. But no vocal opposition has emerged to the project. Organizers say on-site education about the history of Black-Jewish ties in America is essential.
Charlotte has its own claims to this history. Humorist and social critic Harry Golden lived in the city and published his commentaries in The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper whose subscribers included Congressional members and well-known writers. In “The Vertical Negro Plan” in 1956, he pointedly noted that whites seemed to have no trouble standing next to Black Americans. It was only when Black people wanted to sit “that the fur begins to fly.” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Remove the seats at schools and lunch counters.
In 1971, attorney Adam Stein, father of N.C. Gov. Josh Stein, was part of the legal team who argued Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The case began the era of busing for school integration nationwide. Busing for that purpose officially ended in Charlotte in 2002, when the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to lower-court ruling recognizing local schools as adequately desegregated .
Now, supporters hope the Circle of Humanity will be a catalyst for Black-Jewish collaborations in other cities. Schindler, named after a great-aunt who was killed during the Holocaust, wants the gathering spot to be a place not only for remembrance, but for inspiration and beginnings.
“It’s really important to me that we bring joy to this work,” she said, envisioning the opening ceremony filled with klezmer music as well as both soul food and Jewish noshes. She cautions against “letting those to seek to harm us control our thoughts and our struggles and our fears. We need to celebrate our culture and who we are with pride and joy, so I pray that this will be a centerpiece for cultural celebration of all sorts.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims appeared first on The Forward.
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Tennessee GOP leaders denounce ‘No wars for Jews’ mailers bearing Young Republicans name
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee region was rocked this week after thousands of homes received mailers encouraging them to join the local Young Republicans chapter with a campaign platform including “No wars for Jews.”
The flyers led to a dramatic showdown at a local GOP meeting, including a state lawmaker’s cry of “I am a Jew!” and a rejoinder from Austin Lee, the young man behind the flyers: “We will not fight wars for you.” Cops escorted the provocateur out.
“Let’s face it, we read about antisemitism and anti-Black or white nationalism, right?” the lawmaker, State Rep. Scott Cepicky, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hear about this stuff, and people are like, ‘Well, you know, that’s over there, or that’s in another state, that’s not here.’ Let me tell you something. It came to Maury County.”
The mailers, which encouraged recipients to “support” Lee, also said “Stop the Great Replacement” (a reference to the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory), “Ban Islam and Hinduism” and “Men in charge.”
“Nonwhite foreigners have invaded our country and are replacing White Americans,” read the flyers, viewed by JTA and reportedly sent to around 2,000 households with young white men. “Efforts at mass deportations have failed. No one is coming to save us; we must solve this problem ourselves.”
The flyers were mailed mainly in Maury County, 50 miles south of Nashville, as well as some surrounding counties. In addition to Lee’s name and an invitation to join the Maury County Young Republicans, they contained the prominent logo of the Tennessee Young Republicans — invoking broader concerns that a younger generation of Republicans are trending toward antisemitic and white nationalist ideas.
However, local Republican leaders told JTA the mailers were sent out without permission; that Lee holds no formal leadership role in the county GOP; and that the county’s Young Republicans chapter is currently inactive.
The county GOP chair strongly denounced the content of the mailers to JTA.
“It’s appalling that somebody would send this out,” Jason Gilliam told JTA about his reaction to the flyers. “This kind of thing really disgusts me. I mean, I have an Israeli flag on my bumper — not that that means anything.”
Gilliam said he first became aware of the flyers on Sunday, after households had begun receiving them. At a local GOP meeting the next day, Cepicky condemned the flyers by invoking his own Jewish ancestry.
“I’m a Jew, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew,” Cepicky told the crowd at the GOP meeting in a video taken and later posted by Lee himself. “My family left Israel, moved to Central Europe. In the 30s, you know what happened in Central Europe with Jews. My family immigrated to the United States.”
After Cepicky threatened to “pursue the law on these individuals” who distributed the mailer, Lee, who was also in attendance at the meeting, identified himself.
Cepicky accused Lee of spreading rhetoric “espoused in Europe” in the 1930s. Lee responded, “It was right then, and it is right now. We will not fight wars for you.” Lee was later escorted from the event by law enforcement. Lee has on social media cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war for Jews.”
Cepicky told JTA he felt compelled to denounce Lee’s antisemitism in part because he was standing in front of a replica of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at the meeting.
“It was behind me, and it spurred me to say, ‘That doesn’t say, “We the Christians,” or, “We the Jews,” or, “We the Islamics,” or, “We the men, we the women.” It doesn’t say that,’” he said. “It says, ‘We the people.’”
Cepicky told JTA that he is a practicing Christian who discovered his Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on 23andMe. He said his family arrived sometime after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He made his first trip to Israel in 2024, to visit the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and helped found the Tennessee Israel Caucus in the state legislature shortly thereafter.
Gilliam and Cepicky both described Lee to JTA as an infrequent attendee at county GOP meetings who holds no leadership role with the party, and said the county Young Republicans chapter was inactive. They added they would be pushing for an investigation into what they said was his unauthorized use of the county and state Young Republicans name on his mailers.
In social media posts and other interviews following the meeting, Lee continued to assert that he was the president of Maury County Young Republicans. He also referred to Cepicky multiple times as “Jewish Representative Scott Cepicky.”
“I took over that chapter,” Lee said in an interview Wednesday with a local radio station, claiming he had used a “process” to reactivate the local Young Republicans group. He declined to answer questions about who funded his mailers.
In a statement to media, the statewide Tennessee Young Republicans said the use of their logo “was not authorized” and said the group “did not, and does not, authorize, endorse, or support the recent communications published by the Maury County Young Republicans.”
As of press time, the Tennessee Young Republicans list Maury County as an active chapter on their website. Efforts by JTA to contact the group’s statewide director were unsuccessful. In recent months, official Young Republicans chapters across the country have become embroiled in antisemitism controversies.
Whether Lee has any more solid connection with local GOP officials was a matter of dispute. Gilliam claimed he had first been introduced to Lee by Aaron Miller, a local elected GOP county commissioner with whom Gilliam has since had a falling-out over unrelated matters. Asked about his relationship to Miller on the radio, Lee declined to comment.
Reached by JTA on Friday, Miller denied he had any connection to Lee beyond that “we had beers a couple of times.”
“I don’t agree with his politics. I don’t agree with his approach,” Miller told JTA. “I got a mailer and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is interesting.’”
Lee did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
Miller did say that young men, feeling unrepresented by the current Republican Party, are seeking out “alternatives to liberal democracy.” He has advocated for the county GOP to reach out more to the population, he said.
“Anything where you’re going to approach an entire group of people with a blanket mindset, I think that’s wicked,” he said. “We’re all made in God’s image.”
Gilliam and Cepicky told JTA that, in addition to the antisemitism, they strongly objected to the mailers’ anti-immigrant rhetoric and misogyny. At a time of Republican-led immigration crackdowns on the national level, and as national figures including Vice President JD Vance have downplayed the rise of antisemitism within the party, these local GOP leaders loudly insisted such forces should be stamped out.
“This kind of stuff is absolutely not going to be allowed. I will not stand for it,” Gilliam said. “If you don’t cut the head off the snake, it’s going to come back, right? It’s not going to stop. It’s only going to fester. It’s going to grow. And this kind of thing, the roots need to be yanked out of the ground.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Austria once denied its Nazi past. Now it sends young people abroad to confront it.
(JTA) — For decades after 1945, Austrians often emphasized their own victimhood under Nazi Germany.
Only in the 1980s and ‘90s did they formally and informally acknowledge the role of Austrians as perpetrators and supporters of Nazi crimes.
In 1998, at the peak of this reckoning, the Austrian Service Abroad program was established to provide young Austrians the chance to work with nonprofit organizations that preserve the memory of the Holocaust and its victims.
Young Austrians just out of high school can choose the program as an alternative to military service. They work in non-profits around the world for 10 months, 34 hours each week at no cost to the receiving organization.
“It has been a big boon to our work and allows us to greatly expand our Holocaust educational offerings,” said Olivia Mattis, the president and CEO of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, a Long Island-based nonprofit that perpetuates the memory of Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. The Portuguese diplomat issued visas to thousands of refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied France.
“There are things we can now do having this extra hand that we were not able to do before,” said Mattis, whose father was rescued by Sousa Mendes.
This year the foundation, which has been part of the program 2022, has welcomed Robin Bigga-Piskernig, 19, as its fifth Austrian participant.
Bigga-Piskernig said he views the program as a way for Austria to “make amends” for its actions during World War II. He’s available for whatever the foundation needs, which includes the production of various educational materials.
“We just now finished new translations for a graphic novel that’s going to be published in an English version as well as French and German,” said Bigga-Piskernig. “Right now there’s a project that involves old passports from the 1940s and an upcoming program about Freud and how he was saved during the Holocaust.”
Jean Lou Cloos, managing director of Austrian Service Abroad, said in an email interview that there is a direct connection between the program and the country’s belated efforts to come to terms with its past.
The program “grew out of Austria’s long and difficult process of confronting National Socialism and the Holocaust,” Cloos said. “For decades after 1945, Austria often emphasized its own victimhood under Nazi Germany. Later, public and political debate became clearer about the fact that Austrians had also been perpetrators, supporters and beneficiaries of Nazi crimes.”
Some 1,323 Austrians 17 and older have taken part in the program since its founding, 85% of them men. Austrians in the program are now in 66 countries, including Germany and Italy.
“Our volunteers work in Holocaust memorials, Jewish museums, archives, research institutions, survivor-related organizations and educational institutions,” he said. “Volunteers serve where memory is preserved, researched and passed on, whether that is Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, a Jewish museum in Europe, or a Holocaust education center in the United States.”
The participants bring a perspective to Holocaust education that is useful in reaching young people like them. As a result of the work of Bigga-Piskernig and his predecessors, Mattis said her organization since 2024 has had an active Instagram account that enables it to post its “hero of the week,” a rescuer during the Holocaust.
Recently it highlighted Michael Ber Weissmandl, an Orthodox rabbi from present-day Solovakia, who helped Jews escape deportation by bribing Nazis and their local collaborators. “He wrote desperate letters through Switzerland to Allied powers asking that they bomb the gas chambers and the train tracks — and of course that never happened,” said Mattis.
Ber Weissmandl is also featured in a set of 52 poker-sized playing cards, each containing a photo of a Holocaust rescue, created and printed by the Sousa Mendes Foundation. The cards would not have been possible without the effort of the Austrian service workers.
“They researched the background of each of the rescuers,” she said.
The Austrian interns were also “absolutely integral” to the foundation in creating graphic novels that tell the story of Sousa Mendes and the families he saved. “We want to get them into bar mitzvah training programs,” said Mattis.
In addition, the foundation helps to produce Sunday film-and-discussion programs on stories of rescue and resistance. It also developed a children’s picture book about Sousa Mendes and his work, and another about Anne Frank and the Anne Frank Sapling Project.
“When she was in hiding with her family from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam,” Mattis said, “there was only one piece of nature outside that she could see. It was a tree and watching it was how she could mark the change of seasons. It lived to age 170, dying in 2010. At that point, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam took saplings from that tree and sent them to sites of remembrance so the Anne Frank story could travel all over the world.”
One of these trees is to be planted at the Sousa Mendes Museum in Portugal and dedicated in July. The foundations invited 20 teachers to the dedication.
“The reason we were so anxious to get this tree is because Anne Frank had a cousin, Jean-Michel Frank, the first cousin of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, and he got his visa from our hero, Sousa Mendes. So we are combining both Anne Frank and Sousa Mendes through this tree.”
Asked about his experience in Austrian Service Abroad, Bigga-Piskernig said his work and the education he has received at the Sousa Mendes Foundation “has helped me better understand the Holocaust and the role of education in helping to reduce antisemitism.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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