EVENT: SCREENING
CATEGORY: DIVERSE VOICES SERIES
DIRECTOR: MENACHEM DAUM
DIRECTOR: OREN RUDAVSKY

COUNTRY: USA
LENGTH: N/A
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GENRE: DOCUMENTARY
RATING: N/A
AGES: 13+

In partnership with KUED and the City Library.

Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s provocative and moving and deeply personal documentary HIDING AND SEEKING: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust won the Grand Prix at the Warsaw Intl. Jewish Film Festival in 2004 and the First Prize for best documentary and Best Interfaith Film of 2004 at the North American Interfaith Network Film Festival. For over twenty-five years Menachem Daum has been interviewing holocaust survivors like his parents, in an attempt to understand their crisis of faith. he first result of this dedication was A LIFE APART: Hasidism in America.  This is the second of an intended trilogy which explores Jewish responses to the Holocaust. The third film will focus on the State of Israel.

HIDING AND SEEKING tells the story of a father who tries to alert his adult Orthodox Jewish sons to the dangers posed by defenders of the faith who preach intolerance of the "other", by those who feel compelled to create impenetrable barriers between "us" and "them."

To broaden their narrow and insular views he takes them on a highly charged emotional journey to Poland. To his sons, like many offspring of Polish Holocaust survivors, this is a country whose people are incurably anti-Semitic and beyond redemption. It is precisely here that he introduces his sons to Poles who personify the highest levels of exemplary behavior.

The highlight of their journey comes when they manage to track down the Polish farm family who risked their lives to hide the sons' grandfather for more than two years during the Holocaust. This encounter and its tumultuous aftermath lead the sons to at least consider their father’s viewpoint more seriously.

In the course of telling its compelling and dramatic story, HIDING AND SEEKING explores the Holocaust’s effect on faith in God as well as its impact on faith in our fellow human beings. It embeds these issues in a deeply personal inter-generational saga of survivors, their children, and their children’s children. Filmed in Jerusalem, Brooklyn and Poland, the film focuses on the filmmaker’s attempt to heal the wounds of the past by stopping the transmission of hatred from generation to generation.

Unfortunately, we are witness to a resurgence of fundamentalism and religious hatred throughout the world. The greatest danger humankind now faces comes from people who claim to be religious and yet are blind to the divinity within each and every one of us. Hiding and Seeking tries to present an example of how it is possible to be true to one’s deepest religious convictions and yet feel a profound sense of connectedness to every single human being.