HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL FILM CHOSEN FOR L.A. FESTIVAL
“The Assembly,” a new documentary featuring San Diego students exploring their own roots while visiting Holocaust memorial sites in Poland last fall, has been selected as the finale screening for the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival on May 24.
Written and produced by filmmaker Hershey Felder, “The Assembly” was first conceived in 2019 as a musicfilled stage play at San Diego Repertory Theatre starring eight high school seniors from the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts (SDSCPA). Then the pandemic struck and San Diego Rep shut down. To keep the project alive, Felder flew the students — now all college-age — to Warsaw last October and filmed them as they visited Jewish cemeteries, ghettos and Nazi death camp museums across the country.
The students are Katelin
Banman, Yzabel Ugalde, Colette Giganti, Isaiah Joshua Foster, Giovanny Diaz de Leon, Alexander Meeder, Olive Benito and Romeo Boccarella.
Felder, who lost his extended Polish family in the Holocaust, initially produced the film as a two-part streaming travelogue-style documentary last fall. But over the winter, he edited the two parts together into a more cohesive, moving and poetic 95-minute film that made its world premiere April 10 at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla. Now “The Assembly” will head out onto the festival circuit, where Felder said he has received screening requests from more than a dozen film festivals around the country.
“The Assembly” was written in honor of Eva Libitzky, a Holocaust survivor who spent the last 40 of her 97 years presenting talks about the Holocaust at high school student assemblies around the United States. Libitzky — who died in 2021 at her home in Florida — survived the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp in Poland, but her family was wiped out in Germany’s genocide of European Jews. Libitzky’s hope was that through teaching young people the truth of the Holocaust,
history would never repeat itself.
When Felder first conceived the play, Libitzky was still alive and eager to be involved in the production. Following her death, “The Assembly” became her memorial and a fulfilled promise to carry on her message, Felder said.
When first presented in two parts last fall, the films mostly followed the students as they listened to tour guides, learning the history of the Holocaust and hearing snippets of Libitzky’s story from Eleanor Reissa, an actress cast to portray the older Eva, performing passages from Libitzky’s autobiography.
Libitzky’s story was harrowing. She was a teenager when her family was herded into a Jewish ghetto in their native Lodz, Poland. There her father died of starvation and her brother disappeared without a trace. She and her mother were sent by train to Auschwitz, where her mother was immediately killed. Libitzky was 21 when she was finally liberated by Russian soldiers in 1945. She later married a fellow Holocaust survivor and they moved to the United States.
In the new condensed film, the plot focuses more on Libitzky’s story, starting with her childhood and progressing through her days at Auschwitz, with Reissa as narrator. The students are emotional observers, several of them clearly learning for the first time the full extent of the horrors of the Holocaust as the camera rolls.
Some of the students are Jewish, but not all. Along the way as they observe Libitzky’s journey, they talk about the prejudices they faced growing up — due to their faith, ethnicity, gender identity or undiagnosed autism behavior. The students feel compelled to follow Libitzky’s example of finding strength and pride in their identity.
Felder has said he hopes the film can one day be presented in schools, so Libitzky’s legacy can carry on at student assemblies long after her death. To see the earlier two-part version of the film, visit hersheyfelder.net.