“It is all these people who are dancing in the streets on Jewish graves who should be watching this film, because if it was any other race this would not be happening,” said the actor Julianna Margulies, who helped create the Holocaust Educator School Partnership with New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. “Do they not remember that Jews fought alongside them and died for their cause?”
The 43-minute film was culled from body cameras worn by Hamas attackers, dashcams, traffic cameras, closed-circuit TV and the mobile phones and social media accounts of victims, soldiers and emergency medical workers. It includes disturbing scenes of people being gunned down as they drive along a highway, cower in their homes and try to flee across an open field. There are still photographs of burned bodies, of bloody teenagers piled in the backs of trucks, of lifeless children in pajamas (their faces blurred to protect their identities).
Shefler said the film could not cover all of the horror — given the hundreds of hours of footage — and represented less than 10 percent of those murdered.
Before the screening, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, warned that the film “will change the way you view the Middle East,” containing “barbarity and cruelty the likes of which you have never seen before.”
While watching, members of the audience gasped, winced and wept. At least two left the theater before the film was over, and one man shouted after it ended “Show the babies! Show the rapes!” before being escorted out by security.
Among those who were wiping away tears was Christina Pascucci, a former newscaster and war correspondent who last month joined the race to succeed Dianne Feinstein in the United States Senate. She said she hoped the film “galvanizes understanding of the horrors of that day and valuing the lives that were lost.”
Pascucci, 38, said it was only when she was in her 20s that she discovered that her grandmother was Jewish; last month she joined a humanitarian mission to Israel.
“It doesn’t need to be a polarizing issue,” she said. “You can simultaneously denounce the killing of innocent Palestinians” and condemn the killing of Jews.
Several news reports said that Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress who starred in “Wonder Woman,” had been among those encouraging people to attend. Ms. Gadot did not respond to messages seeking comment and was not at the screening, though her husband, Jaron Varsano, attended.
The event was one of two organized by Greenberg and Melissa Zukerman, a publicist, with the support of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. The other took place in New York the night before. Among those in the auditorium in Los Angeles, Zukerman confirmed, were Ynon Kreiz, chairman and chief executive of Mattel; David Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Skydance Media; and Roger Lynch, the chief executive officer of Condé Nast.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, said in a telephone interview from Israel that he had “never been in favor of atrocity footage,” but “this footage needs to be shown.”
The film was followed by a video of Broadway stars singing “Bring Him Home,” from “Les Misérables,” in support of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Many of those in attendance spoke of the Holocaust and World War II. “We are the leftovers of pogroms,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, who established the Wiesenthal Center, noting that it was the eve of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in 1938 when the Nazis smashed Jewish storefronts, killed Jews and sent thousands to concentration camps.
Several said that they were saddened that it seemed necessary to show, and watch, such upsetting footage.
“It should be enough that there are eyewitness accounts and there are funerals and there are shivas and there are bereaved families,” said Rabbi Sharon Brous, the founder and senior rabbi of Ikar, a Los Angeles congregation. “But it’s apparently not enough. So there has to be a historical record that’s established, and these videos are part of establishing that record.”
Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/arts/screening-footage-israel-hollywood.html