The Inside Experience of East Bloc Jews : Five features and two shorts at the NuWilshire reveal prewar Jewish life in Eastern Europe

The Jewish Museum of New York and the Film Society of Lincoln Center this week presents “Re-Emergence: Jewish Life in Eastern Europe.” The series of five features and two shorts from Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Poland that reflect the increasing openness in examining the Jewish experience in the former Eastern bloc will be at the NuWilshire today through Aug. 19.

Alexander Rodnyansky’s “The Mission of Raoul Wallenberg” (1990), which screens tonight at 7, is a terse, beautiful and impassioned documentary that breaks fresh ground in its attempt to discover the fate of the heroic Swedish diplomat who succeeded in saving thousands of Hungarian Jews only to be taken prisoner in Budapest by the Soviets, who claimed he died in prison in 1947.

Rodnyansky, a third-generation Ukrainian-Jewish documentarian, not only assembles numerous persuasive witnesses who attest that Wallenberg was alive years, even decades, after his reported death but also individuals who for whatever personal reasons are intent upon becoming part of the mystery--the man who claims that Wallenberg was his father and another who firmly asserts that Wallenberg was arrested by none other than Leonid Brezhnev, who then confiscated a hoard of jewels entrusted to the diplomat by those he helped escape.

Beyond such bizarre incidents the documentary emerges as a comment on the stonewall mentality of the Soviet bureaucracy, which has systematically eliminated virtually all records of Wallenberg’s existence. Rodnyansky’s parting shot, however, is to assert that the answer to Wallenberg’s fate is locked in the files of the KGB. Accompanying this film is Rodnyansky’s brief, unbearably poignant short, “Meeting With Father” (1990), about an elderly Ukrainian of German descent suddenly accused and sentenced to death as a traitor simply because he served as an interpreter during World War II. These two films screen again Friday at 7; Saturday at 3 and 7; Tuesday at 5 and 9, and Wednesday at 1, 5 and 9.

Loosely adapted from Isaac Babel’s “Odessa Tales,” Alexander Zeldovitch’s “Sunset” (1990) interweaves the story of King David and his son, Absalom, with a tale of an Odessa laborer and his son, a denizen of the Odessa underworld of the ‘20s. At once surreal and tedious with much posturing, “Sunset” is the least accessible of the series’ offerings. It screens today and Friday at 5 and 9; Saturday at 1, 5 and 9.

Two of the finest films deal with coming of age and center on friendships between a Christian and a Jewish youth. Pal Sandor’s sweeping, emotion-charged 1983 “Daniel Takes the Train,” which screens Sunday at 3 and 7 and Monday at 7, is set against the flight of more than 165,000 people in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion.

Actually, the film commences five days before the invasion begins. As best friends Gyuri (Sandor Zsoter) and Daniel (Peter Rudolf) board a train for the long journey west to the frontier, they embark on an odyssey full of unexpected and ultimately drastic consequences.

Radoslaw Piwowarski’s 1989 “March Caresses” (Tuesday at 7, Wednesday at 3 and 7) is similar but more complex. Piwowarski reveals the impact both of the student rebellions in Western Europe in 1968 and the government’s anti-Zionist campaign that year in the wake of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War upon a group of freedom-craving young people in a small Polish town. There’s considerable stinging social and political satire and criticism of Polish society and a refreshing candor about lingering Polish anti-Semitism rarely dealt with in Polish films.

The most affecting film of the entire festival is Edit Koszegi, Sandor Simo and Andras Suranyi’s haunting 1990 “Photographs (To Our Children),” which screens Sunday at 1, 5 and 9; Monday at 5 and 9.

The filmmakers evoke a sunny and elegant vanished world and its destruction in World War II through the family photographs of Holocaust survivors, who tell us their stories as we see their treasured photos fill the screen, interspersed with archival images and footage.

Not only do we come away with a sense of what prewar Hungarian Jewish life and its disintegration was like, but also are reminded of the timeless power of photographs to freeze an image for all time while underlining our sense of mortality. For more information: (310) 394-8099.