May 6th marks the annual observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. We are screening the film Resistance: They Fought Back, directed and produced by Paula Apsell, family member TST congregants Dr. Emily Apsell Singer and David Singer. After the film, Rabbi Danny will moderate a discussion of the film with Paula and field questions from the audience. 

Read more about the film and the Director's Statement below, just above the registration form.

Please register below for this commemorative event and film screening. 



SYNOPSIS
"People have this myth stuck in their heads that Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter. But this is where the real story begins…Jews did not go as sheep to the slaughter… They fought back.” 
- Professor Richard Freund

We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The feature documentary Resistance – They Fought Back got its start on a sunny June day in 2019 at my kitchen table in Boston during a visit from Holocaust scholar and archeologist Richard Freund. In 2016, Kirk Wolfinger, his team from Lone Wolf Media, and I had made a documentary for the PBS NOVA series following Dr. Freund and his team as they discovered an underground escape tunnel in a forest in Lithuania where the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered 70,000 Jews. As we learned when our film aired the next year, very few people had ever heard of this tunnel dug with spoons by shackled Jewish prisoners, twelve of whom escaped to fight with the partisans. But it is far from the only example oof Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. When I asked why such examples of Jewish heroism were not more widely known, Dr. Freund quipped, “Because you haven’t made the film yet.” 

Perhaps intended as a joke, I took the response as a challenge. I had just retired after 35 years as NOVA’s Executive Producer, and I was looking for a project to engage my mind and my heart. And what could be more worthwhile, more challenging to research and recount, than this largely unknown story of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust? As I would learn, many stories of Jewish resistance have all but vanished. In some cases, no historical records exist, and no one survived to tell the tale. The Germans documented many aspects of their war against the Jews, but they were allergic to any mention of Jewish resistance, leading many to think it never happened and to believe that “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” 

Resistance – They Fought Back, the feature documentary my production partners at Lone Wolf Media and I wound up making, is a passionate refutation of that way of thinking. Told by survivors, their children, and expert witnesses from the U.S., Israel, and Europe, it is a revelation based on extensive research of how the Jews of Europe fought back. It uncovers evidence of non-violent methods which served as crucial tools of resistance and evolved into Jewish armed revolts in ghettos, forests and death camps, even as the odds of success were vanishingly small.  Today, almost eighty years after the Holocaust, this story remains largely unknown to the general public. Without it, our understanding of this genocide, which wiped out two-thirds of European Jews, remains incomplete, giving rise to renewed antisemitism, hatred, and denial of the Holocaust itself. 

I hope you find this film meaningful and important.
- Co-Director/Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell