Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180129
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`SILENCE' HOPED TO HELP DIALOGUE ON HOLOCAUST
Deborah Lefkowitz is an independent filmmaker whose business it is to see things from a slightly different angle.She is also an American Jew married to a German who is not Jewish.
When she put personal and professional life together a few years ago, the result was an hour-long documentary called "Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany."
The film explores the "silences and omissions" of Jews and non-Jews in her husband's home town - people "separated by the history of the Holocaust and the language that grew out of it."
The film will be shown at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Grandin Theatre as part of the Days of Remembrance observance in the Roanoke Valley.
The week-long observance commemorates the lives of the 6 million Jews killed before and during World War II in what is now commonly called the Holocaust.
While the remembrance of the Holocaust is important, Lefkowitz said in a telephone interview last week, she felt that both Americans and Germans had "little opportunity to find out about Jewish life [in Germany] today."
Studies of the Holocaust, she feared, "do not reflect the vibrancy of Jewish life today" in the land that spawned it.
Getting that story out is complicated by the fact that many German Jews work to maintain a degree of anonymity in a country where a recent poll found that about one-third of the residents say there was "some good" under Nazi rule and a fourth say Jews are "at least partially at fault" for the persecution they have endured.
Over several years, Lefkowitz, who lives in Boston, worked to build a relationship of trust with Jews and non-Jews in a German town of about 100,000, and was ultimately able to "straddle the two communities," she said.
She helps protect that trust by declining to name the town or show the faces of the 60 or so people who speak in the film. Instead she uses the inhabitants' voices to narrate a composite of images, which include scenes of day-to-day life in the town.
Lefkowitz, 34, said she has shown the award-winning film and spoken to audiences about it nearly 50 times in some 40 cities - including seven screenings in Germany. Those have "provoked lively discussions in small groups," as well as expressions of surprise even among those who were in the film.
A Christian minister who is engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue in the city where the film was shot was "hurt and upset" that no Jews had ever spoken as freely to him about their fears and concerns as they had in the film. Yet a Jew in the group confirmed "that this is an accurate description."
For Lefkowitz, who speaks fluent German, it was "an exciting interaction," and just the kind of dialogue she hoped the film would spark.
Sponsors of the Days of Remembrance in the Roanoke Valley hope the film, the kickoff event for the week, will be such a catalyst for dialogue here.
This year, the worldwide day of observance for the victims of the Holocaust is today, though commemorative events often are spread out over a week.
In Hebrew, the word Shoah - "violent storm" - is used to refer to the Nazi extermination effort, and the day of remembrance is called Yom Hashoah. It falls on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan. It usually falls in April, though occasionally may be in early May.
Also scheduled for the observance:
Auschwitz death camp survivor Susan Cernyak-Spatz will speak twice Wednesday at the Hollins College Chapel. She will address high-school students at 10 a.m. and a college audience at 3:30 p.m.
Two events will conclude the week next Sunday, April 25, at Temple Emanuel, 1123 Persinger Road S.W.
Between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., names of some of the victims of the Holocaust will be read. Jewish organizations around the world participate in the readings of about 3 million names that have been chronicled.
At 3:30 p.m., an ecumenical service of remembrance will be held at the Temple, focusing on the 50th anniversary of the uprising by captive Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The last houses in the ghetto, to which Jews had been restricted by Poland's Nazi occupiers, were razed in May 1943 after some of the last occupants rose up in violent revolt.
Days of Remembrance events are sponsored by the Roanoke Chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Roanoke Jewish Community Council, and the Hollins College Department of Philosophy and Religion.