In Remembrance of Kristallnacht
November 6, 2022 | 1pm | In Person Only | $5 per person
In remembrance of Kristallnacht, OJMCHE is screening the recently released film Three Minutes A Lengthening followed by a discussion with Joe Hertzberg and Natan M. Meir.
The film presents a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938 in Nasielsk, a Jewish town in Poland, and tries to postpone its ending. As long as we are watching, history is not over yet. The three minutes of footage, mostly in color, are the only moving images left of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk before the Holocaust. The existing three minutes are examined to unravel the stories hidden in the celluloid. The footage is imaginatively edited to create a film that lasts more than an hour. Glenn Kurtz, grandson of David Kurtz, provides his knowledge of the footage. Maurice Chandler, who appears in the film as a boy, shares his memories. Actress Helena Bonham Carter narrates the film essay.
This program is co-sponsored by Never Again Coalition and PSU Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program.
Joe Hertzberg recently retired from a long career as a management consultant in Portland. After years of working mostly with businesses large and small, he turned his practice to local governments, purpose-driven businesses, and nonprofit organizations including many in the Jewish community. On August 4, 1938, his father Chaim was working as a shoemaker in his hometown of Bieżuń, Poland, 60 miles from Nasielsk. The two villages bear an uncanny resemblance to one another. Joe has visited Bieżuń twice, and it has been largely unchanged since 1938… but there are no Jews.
Natan M. Meir is the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies in the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University. A scholar of the social, cultural, and religious history of East European Jewry, he is the author of Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914 (2010) and Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (2020). He lectures widely on Jewish history and culture in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and the Baltics; Jewish folklore and magic; and Jewish disability history. He also serves as a museum consultant and leads study tours of Eastern Europe with Ayelet Tours.