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Jewish daily life and culture shot by Roman Vishniac

Film | Not Digitized | Accession Number: 2000.621.1 | RG Number: RG-60.2526 | Film ID: 2302

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    Overview

    Description
    Religious Jews at work in their agricultural community. Various shots of them building homes and at work in the fields in the remote Carpathian village of Vysni Apsa. Also shown are children weaving baskets, studying and riding horses across a river. This footage contains several good CUs of adults and children, particularly focusing on facial expressions, gestures, and clothing. Shots are well lit and expertly framed.

    Chaim Simcha Mechlowitz, an Orthodox Jewish farmer, tanner, and father of eleven children appears from 12:33:50 to 12:34:11 and 12:35:54 to 12:36:00. He was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

    In 1938, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) commissioned Roman Vishniac to make three films of the remote Carpathian Jewish villages and Galician towns he had been documenting for the relief organization in still photographs since 1935. The films were lost during the upheavals of the war. These outtakes document the rural and observant Jewish farming communities that had been isolated for hundreds of years.

    Vishniac noted in his seminal publication, "A Vanished World" that: "In 1648 a group of Jews crossed the Carpathian Mountains seeking refuge from the massacres and tortures of Bohdan Khmeltinsky. In this bleak, desolate part of the world, they founded the village of Upper Apsa, which was unknown to the outside world. Here farmers still grew the same type of corn Columbus had brought from the New World. It took great exertions and heavy pressure for their plows to furrow the earth." "The peasants were all so uneducated that you could not speak with them about anything. Their interest was just vodka; only alcohol to drink. But a Jewish peasant - he was a wise man who knew about life, without having a radio or newspaper or any information, nothing but his own thought and understanding. And this made him most interesting for all discussions. He asked me if a danger existed and if Hitler's police would come, arrest him, and send him to death. I feared this, too, but could not advise him. There was no place to go. The whole world was closed and nobody was interested in saving the Jews."
    Duration
    00:18:53
    Date
    Event:  1938?
    Production:  1936-1938
    Locale
    Hungary
    Credit
    Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Mara Vishniac Kohn and The International Center of Photography
    Contributor
    Director: Roman Vishniac
    Camera Operator: Roman Vishniac
    Biography
    Born in Russia in 1897, Roman Vishniac was a biologist by training, having earned a doctorate in zoology and a medical degree from Moscow universities and a doctorate in Oriental art from the University of Berlin. For many years he was prevented from working in any of those fields because of war, revolution and political persecution. He instead pursued a career in microphotography, the photographing of insects, cells, plankton and other small organisms. His images in this area regularly appeared in Life magazine. From 1935 to 1938, Vishniac explored on foot the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, recording life in the Jewish shtetlekh (villages) of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania, communities that even then seemed threatened by routine change as much as by violence and extermination. Using a hidden camera and working under difficult circumstances that included evading the police and also Nazis, he was able to take thousands of photographs. Before he finished the tour, he had been jailed eleven times and placed in a concentration camp in Vichy France. Roman Vishniac died in 1990.

    Physical Details

    Language
    Silent
    Genre/Form
    Unedited.
    B&W / Color
    Black & White
    Image Quality
    Good
    Time Code
    12:28:12:00 to 12:47:05:00
    Film Format
    • Master
    • Master 2302 Video: VHS - 1/2 inch - NTSC
      Master 2302 Video: VHS - 1/2 inch - NTSC
      Master 2302 Video: VHS - 1/2 inch - NTSC
      Master 2302 Video: VHS - 1/2 inch - NTSC

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    This archival media can only be accessed in a Museum reading room or other on-campus viewing stations.
    Copyright
    The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Mara Vishniac Kohn
    Conditions on Use
    All queries concerning the Vishniac Archive, including all rights and reproduction requests, should be directed to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California at Berkeley, magnesrights@berkeley.edu.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Film Provenance
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum purchased this video collection from the National Center for Jewish Film for general reference in July 2000.
    Note
    An identical 16mm print is available at the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) - http://mirc.sc.edu/fedora/repository/usc%3A2799.
    See also Story 2721, Film ID 2412 and Story 753, Film ID 504 for duplicate footage.

    See USHMM Photo Archives W/S# 22054 and 22050 for family photographs of Chaim Mechlowitz.
    Copied From
    16mm original; 16mm preservation neg; 16mm prints
    Film Source
    National Center for Jewish Film
    File Number
    Legacy Database File: 2627
    Record last modified:
    2024-02-21 08:03:17
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn1002014

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