Judith Trachtenberg

The Jazz Singer(en)

A young Jewish man is torn between tradition and individuality when his old-fashioned family objects to his career as a jazz singer. This is the first full length feature film to use synchronized sound, and is the original film musical.

Jakob the Liar(en)

In 1944 Poland, a Jewish shop keeper named Jakob is summoned to ghetto headquarters after being caught out after curfew. While waiting for the German Kommondant, Jakob overhears a German radio broadcast about Russian troop movements. Returned to the ghetto, the shopkeeper shares his information with a friend and then rumors fly that there is a secret radio within the ghetto.

The Merchant of Venice(en)

Venice, 1596. Bassanio begs his friend Antonio, a prosperous merchant, to lend him a large sum of money so that he can woo Portia, a very wealthy heiress; but Antonio has invested his fortune abroad, so they turn to Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, and ask him for a loan.

Uprising(en)

In the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, Jews rise against the Nazis.

The Island on Bird Street(en)

Alex is an 11-year old boy who, during WWII, hides in the Jewish ghetto from Nazis after all his relatives have been sent to the concentration camp. The movie portrays the ghetto through his eyes.

La terre promise(en)

In a small east-european ghetto, the Jewish family is celebrating Easter. The fraternal dissonance between the Sigoulim brothers pretty accurately mirrors the strife between the two powers, one surrounding Samuel, a devoted rabbi, and the other around Moïse, a talented money lender. Moïse becomes the king of petrol and ships to London with his niece Lia. Conflict continues and leads to the violent strike by oilworkers...

The Girl with the Instagram(he)

Nagyvárad, Hungary, 1944. From February to June, Eva Heyman, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, wrote a diary describing the harsh conditions of her life under Nazi occupation. How would she have told her story if she had used Instagram?

The Painted Bird(cs)

A young boy wanders Eastern Europe during World War II.

The Fixer(en)

Set in tsarist Russia around the turn of the century and based on a true story of a Russian Jewish peasant Yakov Bog who was wrongly imprisoned for a most unlikely crime - the “ritual murder” of a Gentile child in Kiev. We witness the unrelenting detail of the peasant handyman's life in prison and see him gain in dignity as the efforts to humiliate him and make him confess fail.

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians(ro)

"I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians." These words, spoken in the Council of Ministers of the summer of 1941, started the ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. The film attempts to comment on this statement.

Distant Journey(cs)

Prague, during World War II. Hana Kaufmann, a Jewish ophthalmologist, marries Dr. Antonín Bureš, a Christian man. When her family is sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, their romance turns into a struggle for survival.

“May Your Memory Be Love“ - The Story of Ovadia Baruch(en)

In March 1943, twenty-year-old Ovadia Baruch was deported together with his family from Greece to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, his extended family was sent to the gas chambers. Ovadia struggled to survive until his liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945. While in Auschwitz, Ovadia met Aliza Tzarfati, a young Jewish woman from his hometown, and the two developed a loving relationship despite inhuman conditions. This film depicts their remarkable, touching story of love and survival in Auschwitz, a miraculous meeting after the Holocaust and the home they built together in Israel. This film is part of the "Witnesses and Education" project, a joint production of the International School for Holocaust Studies and the Multimedia Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this series, survivors recount their life stores - before, during and after the Holocaust. Each title is filmed on location, where the events originally transpired.

The Great Dictator(en)

Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel's regime.

To Be or Not to Be(en)

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, an acting troupe becomes embroiled in a Polish soldier's efforts to track down a German spy.

The Golem: How He Came into the World(de)

In 16th-century Prague, a rabbi creates the Golem - a giant creature made of clay. Using sorcery, he brings the creature to life in order to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution.

Lodz Ghetto(en)

The Polish city of Lodz was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entire duration of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors of the occupation are vividly chronicled through newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived--and died--through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing over the course of the film, symbolic of the death of each narrator.

House of Life: A Jewish Cemetary in Prague(en)

A deep dive documentary into the history of the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague.

Shielding the Flame(pl)

Warsaw: A City Divided(pl)

The history of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-43) as seen from both sides of the wall, its legacy and its memory: new light on a tragic era of division, destruction and mass murder thanks to the testimony of survivors and the discovery of a ten-minute film shot by Polish amateur filmmaker Alfons Ziółkowski in 1941.

The Plumber(en)

As curfew approaches, an everyday heroine risks it all in a smuggling operation from Nazi-occupied Poland.