Premiere Showing of The Early Years Volume III!

CROWN HEIGHTS, Brooklyn [CHI] — Last night, there was an impressive premiere at the Jewish Children’s Museum. The Early Years, Volume III was shown to a group of guests made up of interviewees, supporters of JEM, the production team and those that helped make the video possible.

More pictures in the Extended Article!

Among there were also families of those interviewed who remembered events as they were playing on the screen. As Mrs. Altein, wife of Rabbi Mottel Altein and daughter of Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, said as she saw the ship that the Previous Rebbe came to America on, “Wow…I was there when the Frierdike Rebbe arrived…”

For over an hour, the group sat mesmerized as they watched witnesses from Israel, Belgium, England, America, France talk about their memories of the Rebbe and Rebbetzin in Paris at the time. Through a combination of interviews, documents, narrations, and re-enactments, the filmmakers shed light on an era in the Rebbe’s life, about which very little is commonly known.

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.”

The team which produced the film, traveled to Paris, London, Dnepropetrovsk, Antwerp, and Jerusalem for the project and conducted research in archives across the world. While at the French National Archives, they discovered never-before-seen documents on the Rebbe’s years at the Sorbonne. (click here to see article)

While coordinating photography in seven countries, Rabbi Yechiel 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 Lubavitchers to the unaffiliated.

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.

Subtitled in English, Hebrew, French, Russian.

To order the video The Early Years I II III, Click Here.