Capturing the Pain and the Promise of Jewish History

When “The Long Way Home” opened last week under the Moriah Films banner, audiences probably thought, “Moriah Films? Never heard of it.”

This moving documentary chronicling events in the lives of the Jews who survived Hitler’s Third Reich only to have international doors slam shut on them is, however, the fourth film produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which launched Moriah Films in 1994.

Taking its name from Mount Moriah, the site in Israel where according to Judaic teachings Jerusalem was founded, Moriah Films exists largely as a result of the efforts of Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Wiesenthal Center, and Richard Trank, executive producer of the center’s film division.

“Jews have always been a people of learning and originally they passed knowledge down orally,” says Hier in a conversation at the Simon Wiesenthal Center office that includes Trank, and Mark Jonathan Harris, who wrote and directed “The Long Way Home.”

Hier points out that when the printing press was invented in the 15th century there was tremendous debate as to whether the Talmud should be codified into writing and that Jewish scholars concluded it must be, because Judaism was obliged to keep up with a changing world.

“Now the world has changed again and the printed page is giving way to visual forms such as computers, video and movies,” says Hier, who was a little-known Orthodox rabbi with a congregation in Vancouver before his arrival in L.A. to establish the city’s only yeshiva in 1977. (To the dismay of many in L.A.’s organized Jewish community, the controversial Hier launched his school, attached it to his own Holocaust museum, and enlisted famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal to lend his name to it before that year was out.)

“There’s no Jewish organization I’m aware of that’s committed to producing documentaries on Jewish history, and we believe film is a useful means for making our rich heritage available to people. Although we won’t focus exclusively on the years 1933-45, Moriah Films will always deal with the Holocaust because it’s central to the mandate of the Wiesenthal Center.”

Hier also says that from 1945 until 1979, when President Carter appointed a commission to address the subject, not a single penny was spent on Holocaust remembrance anywhere in the world, and that there were no major films on the subject released during those years. This isn’t entirely true; 1959’s “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Judgment at Nuremberg,” out in 1961, are just two such films that come to mind. But Hier’s point that awareness of the Holocaust is greater today than it was 30 years ago is a good one. He’s quick to add, though, that the Wiesenthal Center and Moriah Films still have their work cut out for them.

“With the exception of Yad Vashem in Israel, there are still no large centers of documentation on the Holocaust in Europe, and as it recedes into the past it becomes increasingly important to teach the lessons of that tragedy,” Hier says. “Anybody who thinks anti-Semitism is a thing of the past should look at what’s being put out on the Internet.”

“We have no intention, however, of just presenting bleak films about Hitler because Jewish life is about positive things, and we want to present great Jews--and non-Jews--who’ve contributed to history. We intend to do documentaries on Jewish literary and musical traditions, for instance, and on broader questions of humanity.”

In a review of nine new books on the Holocaust recently published in the New York Review of Books, writer Istvan Deak makes the point that “establishing a critical consensus about that memory has proven difficult because in the vast literature of the Holocaust, scholars have disagreed on nearly every major issue.” Nonetheless, Moriah Films seems to be making its way, in a loosely chronological manner, through Jewish history of the 20th century.

The first film from the Wiesenthal Center, released in 1981, was “Genocide,” which won an Oscar in 1982. Written by Hier, directed and produced by Arnold Schwartzmann, and narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and the late Orson Welles, the film chronicles the events of the years 1933-45.

Nine years later, it released “Echos That Remain” (also written by Hier and directed by Schwartzmann), which attempts to give a sense of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Shot in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, and including still photographs by the late Roman Vishniac, the film has the quality of a foreboding fable.

In 1994 the center launched Moriah Films with the release of “Liberation,” which tells the story of the Allied liberation of the camps--a story that is, in a sense, completed in “The Long Way Home,” which premiered this year at Sundance, where it was warmly received.

Moriah films are financed entirely in-house--budgets average around $650,000--and their WestL.A. office includes editing and sound facilities. The entertainment industry has been extremely supportive of Moriah, and many stars--including Ben Kingsley, Martin Landau, Michael York, Morgan Freeman, Ed Asner, Whoopi Goldberg--have participated in the films.

“The films are made to be shown in theaters to diverse audiences, and we’re looking to bring first-rate directors and writers to the museum to work with us,” says Trank, who grew up in a Downey neighborhood largely composed of immigrant survivors. “We made the first three films with Arthur Schwartzmann and that collaboration was a good one, but we felt it was time to expand Moriah and the kind of films we were making. I was familiar with Mark’s writing, and because we felt this film needed a strong script, I called him and he agreed to put another film project on hold and work with us.”

A former reporter who’s now a tenured professor at USC, where he chaired the Film and TV Production Department from 1992 to 1997, Harris recalls: “I began this project with no knowledge whatsoever of the period the film covers, and in researching it I realized much of what I was discovering would be fresh material to other people. The most surprising thing I discovered was that the world turned its back on the people who’d survived the camps.

“This episode of history was so horrific that it was very difficult for people to deal with it,” says Harris, who grew up in Pennsylvania, where he encountered very little anti-Semitism. “People felt guilty because they’d stood by helplessly as millions were killed, and the survivors reminded them minded them of their impotence. One woman I interviewed told me, ‘Many people said, “I know how painful this was for you, and that you don’t want to talk about it.” What they really meant was, “I don’t want to hear about it.” ’

“The liberation of the camps was followed by a conspiracy of silence, and people recoiled from the survivors because of the dehumanization they’d been subjected to,” adds Harris. “A chaplain who was in Germany during those years told us that, after the Allied troops liberated the camps, they ordered German citizens to tour the camps to see what had taken place in their country. He said many Jews who’d survived the war refused to visit the camps because they didn’t want to see how cheap Jewish life was. They also felt terrible shame about what had been done to them, because at that point Jews were seen as sheep who’d willingly gone to their own slaughter. It took a while for people to realize they had no choice whatsoever, and once that became clear, people were horrified by the sense of powerlessness it brought up.”

Adds Trank: “There were U.S. soldiers who fought in Europe, saw the camps, then returned to America and fought for legislation banning immigration for 10 years. People simply didn’t want to deal with the survivors.”

Central to “The Long Way Home” is the attempt made by survivors throughout Europe to make their way to Israel, which has always been regarded as the Jewish homeland, and has had a Jewish presence for 3,000 years. The region was invaded by Arabs in the 7th century, and they too have maintained a presence there ever since; the conflict between these two peoples continues to this very day.

After the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the League of Nations made Palestine a mandated territory of Britain. In 1917 Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, which expressed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but under pressure from the Arabs, they changed their minds once they’d been given the reins of power. By 1939 the British had begun to severely restrict Jewish immigration to Israel, and by 1945 they were allowing just 1,500 Jews to enter the country each month.

Europe, of course, was completely in ruins at that point--11 million were left homeless in Germany alone. Jewish survivors were shunned at every turn, and 100,000 of them wound up in “displaced persons” camps run by the U.S. Army, where conditions weren’t markedly better than they’d been in the concentration camps. By 1947 the British had given up trying to stave off the flood of Jews attempting to immigrate, and the following year, on May 14, the state of Israel was officially born.

The international community comes off badly in “The Long Way Home,” and the conduct of the British is particularly atrocious. In fact, the only international leader who behaves in a remotely humane fashion is President Harry Truman. “Truman had an empathy for Jews that Franklin Roosevelt lacked, but Truman wasn’t terribly sensitive to the Japanese,” Harris says. “Human beings have a deadly capacity to demonize those they oppose.”

On the strength of “The Long Way Home,” Harris landed the job of writing and directing a feature film commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. As yet untitled, the film is budgeted at $1.5 million, which makes it Moriah’s priciest film to date.

“The next film doesn’t pick up where ‘The Long Way Home’ left off because it would’ve been impossible to cover the events of 50 years in a two-hour film,” says Harris, who’s in the midst of editing 30 hours of footage he shot in Israel this summer.

“The BBC is doing a seven-hour series on the subject, and Israel TV is doing a 24-hour series--and even with 24 hours to work with, they’re having to leave things out. Obviously, we had to take a different tack in order to address the subject in just two hours. What we’re trying to do is create a history of Israel that sheds some light on exactly what kind of state the Jews created--most people only know Israel through the news or ads for tourism. We’re also exploring what the making of that state demanded, and what the next 50 years look like.”

Harris is co-writing the film with Stuart Shoffman, an American screenwriter who’s lived in Israel since 1989, where he’s a columnist for the biweekly magazine the Jerusalem Report; Harris confesses that they both feel a bit daunted by the fact that the film will be translated into many languages and seen in countries around the world.

In making this, along with the rest of its films, Moriah has accumulated hundreds of hours of archival footage, which is now cataloged and stored at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Film Archive in West L.A.

“World War II was a black-and-white war, and for years nobody saw the color footage pertaining to the Holocaust that had been shot,” says Trank. “I once worked on an exhibition that included color footage shot by the British of the aftermath of Nazi medical experiments, and people were just running out of the museum because it was so horrific. Because it wasin color and was shot so beautifully, people found it harder to take.”

Adds Hier: “With the end of communism, the Eastern European archives went through a period of tremendous change. During the years of the Cold War, the contents of the Eastern archives weren’t shared with the international community, but once the Wall went down, new information came out that changed our understanding of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the bank of Holocaust imagery, however, may not be as significant as the collective change that’s occurred in how we take such images in.

“We’ve been desensitized to images,” Harris says. “Look at what we’re exposed to on the nightly news--open graves, huge piles of bodies. It’s diminished the power of images of the Holocaust, and one of the challenges presented by these films is how to make people comprehend world events with fresh eyes, without simply increasing the horror.”