Premiere Screeing of New JEM Video ‘Early Years II’

Last night the theatre at the Jewish Children’s Museum saw an unexpected type of screening. A new film about the Rebbe and Rebbetzin’s life in Paris between 1932-1938, was unveiled.

Produced and presented by Jewish Educational Media, the event was billed as “a thank you for all those who made the film happen.” In the audience were interviewees and their families; the staffs of the Rebbe’s Library, Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, and others who assisted with research, along with the film’s producers and editors.

Picture Gallery in the Extended Article!

Through a combination of interviews, documents, narrations, and re-creations, the filmmakers shed light on an era in the Rebbe’s life about which very little is commonly known.

It all started when the staff at JEM realized that very few people remained who had first-person knowledge of the Rebbe’s early life. Eventually they realized that urgent measures were needed if they were to save anything. So the project evolved, according to Rabbi Yechiel Cagen, the film’s producer, from the interviews he was doing for the My Encounter with the Rebbe project.

“We realized that if we wanted people to share their testimony, it couldn’t be for interviews that would sit on a shelf. It had to be about a release.” So they decided to interview the first-person witnesses to early events in the Rebbe’s life, “for the production of a film.”

They figured they’d paste the interviews together, and release a video of “oral history.”

But from there, things took a life of their own. “In order to interview somebody well, you must research,” said Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, who did much of the historical examination leading up to the interviews. “Once you research, you come up with questions. When you find the answers, you need to learn more.” And on it went.

If they intended for this to be merely an oral history project, they finished way off the mark. In the mold of “The Early Years I,” the film uses music, narration’s, and documents to bring the interviews to life.

Speaking at the screening, Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin, JEM’s Director said, “Through the past year and a half that we were working on the film, literally hundreds of people helped us out.”

He should know. The team which produced the film, traveled to Paris for the project and conducted research in archives across the world. While coordinating photography in seven countries, Cagen, the film’s producer, learned about the Rebbe’s history from the inside: Studying the documents, interviewing the people who were there, and finally, overseeing the editing process.

Yanky Ascher, the film’s editor, skillfully pulled together scenes from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

The interviewees hail from across the Jewish spectrum: From religious to the unobservant; from geshe Lubavitch families to self-proclaimed “misnagdim.”

The film also has some surprises. Like the French Professor who suspends the Rebbe from engineering school for leaving early on a Friday afternoon without special permission.

For those of us not steeped in the history of the Rebbe’s early life, in a masterful way, the film pulls back one layer, teaching us that we still have much to learn, and leaving us thirsting for more.

The Early Years II. Approximately 60 Minutes, additional 25 minutes of bonus footage. Available this week on DVD.

Subtitled in English, Hebrew, French, Russian.

The video can be ordered at JEMstore.com