Powstaje film o rodzinie Ulmów

Krzysztof Bielawski

Kto doniósł na Ulmów? To pytanie padnie w powstającym właśnie filmie o tragedii z Markowej.

Zdjęcia do filmu rozpoczęły się w lutym, kręcone są m.in. w skansenie w Markowej oraz w jednej z kamienic w Łańcucie. Film będzie składał się z 2 warstw: dokumentalnej i fabularnej.

Jedna z chałup w skansenie w Markowej będzie filmowym domem Ulmów (fot. Akademia Aktorska „Artysta” )

Jedna z chałup w skansenie w Markowej będzie filmowym domem Ulmów (fot. Akademia Aktorska „Artysta” )
W części dokumentalnej twórcy filmu pokażą Markową oraz wspomnienia jej mieszkańców, dotyczące Żydów i udzielanej im pomocy. Zarejestrowano opowieści krewnych rodziny Ulmów, między innymi siostrzenicy Józefa Ulmy.
Część fabularyzowana będzie trwać około 10 minut i obejmie sceny z codziennego życia wsi oraz rekonstrukcję nocnego najazdu Niemców na dom, w którym Ulmowie ukrywali Żydów i późniejszą egzekucję.

Scena najazdu na dom Ulmów (fot. Katarzyna Pytel)

– Postawimy i zostawimy otwarte pytanie, kto doniósł na rodzinę Ulmów – zapowiada Katarzyna Mazurkiewicz z TV Łańcut w rozmowie z Małgorzatą Motor z dziennika „Nasze Miasto Łańcut”.

Ewa Mrówczyńska w roli Wiktorii Ulmy (fot. Akademia Aktorska „Artysta” )

Film powstaje we współpracy TV Łańcut, Akademii Aktorskiej „Artysta” z Rzeszowa i Miejskiego Domu Kultury w Łańcucie. W roli Józefa Ulmy wystąpi Robert Żurek z Teatru im. Siemaszkowej, a jego żonę Wiktorię zagra Ewa Mrówczyńska z Teatru Maska. Wybrano też aktorów drugoplanowych i statystów. W ich role wcielą się między innymi mieszkańcy Markowej.

Autor: Krzysztof Bielawski
Źródło: Motor M., Kręcą film o rodzinie Ulmów. Wiemy, kto w nim zagra, „Nasze Miasto Łańcut” z 21.03.2016.

500 Years of Jewish Life in Venice

David Laskin

A journey into one of the world’s oldest Jewish ghettos, where this year a long, rich history is commemorated.

The Ponte delle Guglie. To the right of the bridge is the passage to the Jewish ghetto. Credit Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

Though you can still see the recesses in the walls where the hinges of the portals once hung, the Venice ghetto has not been a prison since Napoleon seized the city and tore down the gates in 1797. Today, no barrier or signpost marks where Venice ends and its ghetto begins. Cross a canal on an arched bridge, duck through a sottoportego (an alley tunneling through a building), disappear down a vent in the urban fabric — you come and go just like everywhere else in the maze of this island city.

But linger long enough in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, the generous, frayed, tree-flecked plaza that anchors this corner of Cannaregio (the quiet northwest quadrant of the city) and you’ll feel the wall of the past closing in. Half a millennium of history does not transpire without stamping the soul of a place.

Established by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan on March 29, 1516, the Venice ghetto was one of the first places where people were forcibly segregated and surveilled because of religious difference. The term itself originated here; the area had been used as a foundry (“geto” in Venice dialect) and over time the neighborhood’s polyglot residents corrupted the word to ghetto.

I traveled to La Serenissima in December to see how the city was gearing up for the anniversary of the establishment of the ghetto. A major exhibition called “Venice, the Jews and Europe: 1516 to 2016” (on view from June 19 to Nov. 13) was being planned for the Ducal Palace, and during the last week of July, Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” will be staged (in English) for the first time in the confines where its most hallucinatory scenes take place. Venice being Venice, there will also be glittering parties, celebrity-filled fund-raisers and fancy dress galas, starting with the invitation-only performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at La Fenice opera house on March 29.

But in the course of my visit, what I became most curious about was the mood of the current Jewish community of 450 people. Venice is such an impossibly beautiful fantasy, it seems astonishing that ordinary people, Jews among them, actually live there. How, I wondered, did deep-rooted Jewish families feel about their past — and future — in this ancient, vulnerable city?

Inside the Scuola Grande Spagnola, or Great Spanish Synagogue,
possibly the work of Baldassare Longhena. Credit Andrea
Wyner for The New York Times
My first answer came inside the humble, rectangular sanctuary of the circa-1532 Scuola Canton, one of five synagogues still standing in the ghetto. The synagogues are open to the public only as part of guided tours offered by the Jewish Museum of Venice, and that morning just three of us (two other Americans and I) had signed up for the 10:30 tour in English. We were standing with our guide, Silvia Crepaldi, admiring the golden spiraling tree-trunk columns that support the arch over the bimah (podium), when the subject of rising sea levels came up.

“The city will be empty before it sinks,” Ms. Crepaldi said ruefully. “Venice is shrinking before our eyes.”

The urban exodus of both Jews and gentiles has been going on for some time, though the pace has accelerated in recent years.

When the ghetto was at its height in the 17th century, 5,000 Jews from Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the Ottoman Empire carved out tiny, distinct fiefs, each maintaining its own synagogue, all of them crammed into an acre and a quarter of alleys and courtyards. Confinement was a burden, but it also provided an opportunity for cultural exchange unparalleled in the diaspora. As Jan Morris, a Venice devotee and one-time resident, writes in “The World of Venice,” the city was a “treasure-box” full of “ivory, spices, scents, apes, ebony, indigo, slaves, great galleons, Jews, mosaics, shining domes, rubies, and all the gorgeous commodities of Arabia, China and the Indies.”

Jewish merchants and bankers were vital to the flow of these commodities, but as Venice declined, the Jewish presence dwindled. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Jewish Venice had shrunk to 1,200 residents. Today, with the city’s total population hovering around 58,000 (down from 150,000 before the war), there are about 450 Venetian Jews left, only a handful of them residing in the ghetto.

“So now the ghetto is just a shell?” I wondered aloud as Ms. Crepaldi led us across the campo, over a bridge, down a street of intriguing-looking shops, and into a tighter, grimmer square (the Campiello delle Scuole or “little square of the synagogues”), flanked by the two Sephardic scuole.

The scene approaching Silvia Crepaldi’s flat. Credit Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

Read more: 500 Years of Jewish Life in Venice

Pakistanis: Anti-Semitics or Anti-Zionists!

Noor Dahri

We are not anti-Semitic but anti-Zionists: This is a claim I have heard everywhere in Pakistan all my life. I have never experienced such lies, bigotry and bias about this subject from the Pakistani nation and particularly the Islamic world generally in my life. The modern Zionist movement started in 1897, nearly 116 years ago, but Jew hatred or “Anti-Semitism” has existed for millennia and this was the prime reason for establishing the modern Zionist movement in Europe at that time.

The Jewish people as a nation have long been the recipients of frequently repeated persecution, ill-treatment and massacre under numerous contrived pretexts. From archaic ‘godlike’ Pharaohs and ancient Kings to near-historic supreme Tsars & despot Chancellors, Jews have been singled out and beleaguered for the sole reason of their religious identity. Throughout Jewish history, where ever and whenever across the world minor (individual) or major (community/social/political) discontent or upheaval occurs, it reignites and releases the never fully suppressed Jews-Hatred. Jews are the easy ‘go-to’ culprits for all the ills of the disgruntled, be they individuals’ or communities’ or countries.’ Jews are accused of being the cause of all their and the world’s woes. Nowhere in the world was/is safe or secure against the inevitable ‘Jew Scapegoating’.

At the end of the 19th C and beginning of 20thC, it was Eastern and Central Europe’s turn. Both before and during the Slavic peasant’s uprising and the new socialist ideology that culminated in the Russian Revolution, Jews were persecuted throughout Europe. And while Jews served honourably alongside their German gentile compatriots in WW1, the outcome of the War helped breed more Anti-Jew hatred, as well as provide an easy target to blame for Germanic failings. All of which fanned the flames of the ever growing wave of anti-Semitism in Mother Russia and later the Fatherland.

In the aftermath of the atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust during WW2 until 1948 and the reestablishment of the State of Israel, Jews had simply no safe or secure place anywhere in the world

However, since both the Muslim Dominion of Pakistan and the Jewish State of Israel emerged on the world map in the late 1940’s, the hatred of Jews by Islamists soared in Pakistan and Jews feared for their safety. Their persecution rose 100 times more in Pakistan compared to the rest of the world’s persecution of Jews. Hundreds of Jewish Pakistani families left Pakistan in the ‘70s. They did not leave straight after the reestablishment of Israel because they identified as Pakistani citizens, but after a further 20 years of ever increasing Anti-Jewish attitudes, they were unable to stay due to this heavy persecution by Pakistani Muslims. And things have not improved in Pakistan but the rhetoric has changed the approach. The Pakistani government insisted that they leave without compensation. All money left behind had to be ploughed back into the Islamic community. Their first real exodus occurred soon after the creation of Israel which triggered many incidents of violence against Jews and the Karachi synagogue became a site of anti-Israel demonstrations.

The majority of Jews who left Pakistan are said to have settled in Ramle, Israel and have built a synagogue called Magain Shalome.

Read more: Pakistanis: Anti-Semitics or Anti-Zionists!

Noor Dahri is an independent researcher based in London, UK. He has studied Counter Terrorism from International Institute for Counter Terrorism ICT- Herzliya – Israel.