Hidden Sparks—A Menachem Daum Film Dialogue Series: Hiding and Seeking
Tuesday, February 3, 5:30 – 8 p.m.
The Center for Jewish Studies presents a retrospective of Menachem Daum’s compelling and challenging films. The four-film series continues on Feb. 3 with Hiding and Seeking, an award-winning documentary which tells the dramatic and emotional story of Daum’s journey with his two sons to Poland to try to find the Polish Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis. The film explores the Holocaust’s effect on faith in God and the faith in our fellow human beings. Without avoiding complexity, it juxtaposes the post-Holocaust image of Poland as an antisemitic country with the encounter with people who personify the highest levels of compassion.
The post-screening discussion will include historian Natalia Aleksiun, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, and Tzvi Dovid Daum.
About Menachem Daum
Menachem Daum, a child of survivors of the Holocaust, stumbled upon a family story in the Polish town of Dzialoszyce that would change the course of his life. His films explore his quest to find common ground between Jews and non-Jews, Orthodox Jews and secular Jews, Polish Catholics and Polish Jews, as well as between Palestinians and Holocaust Survivors. His Orthodox upbringing as a child of survivors born in a DP camp and brought up in Schenectady and mostly in New York City, and his early encounters at Brooklyn College with secular Jews, and, in New York, with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, led him on his first journey to Poland in the late 1980s. Carlebach’s outreach to the Polish people was in total contradiction to his experience with his own survivor community, who often had disdain for their former Polish neighbors. That experience inspired him to re-examine his own viewpoints and to embark on a lifelong search for a way to bridge the often insurmountable gaps between people. Equally central to Menachem’s lifelong search was seeking to understand his father’s faith after losing his wife and a child during the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis. This search led to his exploration of the Hasidic Jewish community and its rebirth in the United States. For over 20 years, Menachem travelled repeatedly to Poland, seeking out “memory keepers,” Polish Catholics and Jews who sought to preserve Jewish memory and bring Jewish life and culture back to Poland, where it was decimated.
