Spa City temple to screen documentary
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. >> Congregation Shaara Tfille, located at 84 Weibel Ave., invites the entire community to join them for breakfast and the showing the 2009 documentary film “Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber” followed by a discussion at 9:30 a.m. March 19.
The cost is $10 per adult and $5 for children under 13. For more information or to RSVP, call 584-2370 by March 17.
The film follows Ruth Gruber’s journey as a student, a reporter, an activist leader and an author. The film captures the drama of her life as she lent her camera lens to refugees of war.
She travelled all over the world re-connecting with many of the people who shared historic moments with her in Europe, in Israel, in the Arctic Tundra, in DP camps and refugee centers overseas and in the United States.
“Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber” received the Audience Award at the Teaneck International Film Festival; Best Documentary at the Miami Jewish Film Festival; Best Documentary at the Denver Jewish Film Festival; Best Documentary at the Berkshire International Film Festival; and Best Documentary at the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival. The film was invited to participate in Project 20/20, a prestigious cultural exchange program, sponsored by the President’s Council for the Arts and Humanities.
Gruber, who documented Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s gulags, life in Nazi Germany and the plight of Jewish refugees, died in November at the age of 105. Born in Brooklyn in 1911 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Gruber held abiding passions for Judaism and German culture. She graduated from Bushwick High School at 15 and New York University at 18. On fellowships, she earned a master’s degree in German at the University of Wisconsin at 19 and a doctorate in German literature at the University of Cologne at 20, one of the youngest ever to achieve that distinction. In 1932, on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, she traveled across Germany and saw festering anti-Semitism.
The first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic in 1935, Ruth also traveled to Alaska as a member of the Roosevelt administration in 1942. Her relationships with world leaders including Eleanor Roosevelt, President Harry Truman, and David Ben Gurion gave her unique access and insight into the modern history of the Jewish people. Gruber often crossed the line from journalist to human rights advocate, reporting as well as shaping events that became the headlines and histori-
cal footnotes of the 20th century.
Over seven decades, she was a correspondent in Europe and the Middle East and wrote 19 books, mostly based on her own experiences. Acting for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she escorted nearly 1,000 refugees from 19 Nazi-occupied nations to a safe haven in the United States on a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1944. They included the only large contingent of Jews allowed into America during World War II. As with many of her exploits, the rescue became the subject of one of her books, “Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America” (1983). It was made into a two-part CBS mini-series in 2001, starring Natasha Richardson as Gruber.
The story was chronicled in her 1948 book, “Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947.” The episode was also the basis of the Leon Uris novel “Exodus,” published in 1958, and of Otto Preminger’s 1960 film adaptation, which starred Paul Newman. A documentary film, “Exodus 1947,” narrated by the CBS News reporter Morley Safer, was broadcast on PBS in 1997. In her later years she continued to write articles and books and lectured widely. Her last book was “Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story” (2007).
Gruber, who worked for The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Post and, briefly, The New York Times, covered the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and many events in the history of Israel, including its war for independence. In 1952, she escorted Eleanor Roosevelt on a visit to development sites in Israel.
In 1951 she married Philip H. Michaels, a New York lawyer who died in 1968. In 1974 she married Henry J. Rosner, an official at New York City’s social services and human resources agencies who died in 1982. Besides her son, an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration, she is survived by a daughter, Celia Michaels, a former CBS News editor who covered the war in Lebanon in 1980; two stepdaughters, Jeri Drucker and Elaine Rosner-Jeria; nine grandchildren; and six greatgrandchildren. Another stepdaughter, the writer Barbara Seaman, died in 2008.