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Synagogues and Jewish businesses in Paris; summer camp for children

Film | Digitized | Accession Number: 2014.534 | RG Number: RG-60.1770 | Film ID: 4119

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    Synagogues and Jewish businesses in Paris; summer camp for children

    Overview

    Description
    The facade of a synagogue in Paris' 18th Arrondissement. Daily life in the surrounding bustling neighborhood, signs of many businesses include French and Hebrew script. Trash fills the gutters and cars and horse-drawn carts share the street. Scenes of an outdoor flea market at the nearby Porte de Clignancourt. Two uniformed soldiers march through the market. A view of the Sacre-Coeur basilica rising above the rooftops of the neighborhood.

    01:02:32 Children on a beach at a summer camp on the Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle, in France. Their fists raised, interact with filmmaker Robert Gessner, and hold a pennant that reads 'Thälmann', perhaps named for Ernst Thälmann, communist politician who challenged Hindenburg (and Hitler) in the 1932 election, and who was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1933 and was held until 1944, when he was shot in Buchenwald on Hitler’s orders. A large group of children march down a path in the countryside carrying the same flag, a building in the background is painted with the letters 'V.P.E.' [Vacances Populaires Enfantines]. Gessner poses with a flag on the beach, and talks to children.

    01:03:51 Exterior of a boutique in Marais, also known as the Pletzl, a Jewish neighborhood of Paris since 1881. 01:03:56 Exterior of a synagogue -- the Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue, built 1913-1914 at 10, Rue Pavée. Kodak logo (leader). Quick panning shots of the interior courtyard of a residential building. Kodak logo (leader). A street sign reads "Rue de Rivoli" in Paris' 4th Arrondissement, a fancy shopping street and the southern border of the Pletzl. The busy neighborhood, including store signs in Hebrew script and a few religious Jews walking about. 01:04:35 A Jewish man Gessner met in a cafe. Street scenes with French Jews. 01:04:58 Street sign: "Rue des Hospitalières St. Gervais," a small street in the center of the Pletzl. Kosher restaurants, "Jacques Brand".

    01:05:15 Blurry shots of a wooded Jewish cemetery, probably the old Jewish cemetery in Prague.
    Duration
    00:05:27
    Date
    Event:  1934
    Locale
    Paris, France
    France
    Prague, Czechoslovakia
    Credit
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, gift of Peter Gessner
    Contributor
    Camera Operator: Robert J. Gessner
    Biography
    Robert Gessner was born on October 21, 1907 in Escanaba, MI. He obtained a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1929 and a M.A. from Columbia University in 1930. He started teaching at New York University in 1930. He married Doris Lindeman on May 27, 1938 and had two children, Peter and Stephen. Mr. Gessner was a screen playwright and the author of several books, including "Massacre" (1931); "Broken Arrow" (1933); "Some of My Best Friends are Jews" (1936); "Treason" (1944); "Youth is the Time" (1945). He was a pioneer educator in motion pictures as an art form. Gessner founded the Motion Picture Department (now Cinema Studies) at NYU in 1941, the first four-year film curriculum leading to a B.A. degree in motion picture studies in the United States. He finished his book "The Moving Image, A Guide to Cinematic Literacy" before he died in June 1968.

    Physical Details

    Language
    Silent
    Genre/Form
    Amateur.
    B&W / Color
    Black & White
    Image Quality
    Poor
    Time Code
    01:00:03:00 to 01:05:30:00
    Film Format
    • Master
    • Master 4119 Film: positive - 16 mm - b&w - silent - reversal original - B-wind
      Master 4119 Film: positive - 16 mm - b&w - silent - reversal original - B-wind
      Master 4119 Film: positive - 16 mm - b&w - silent - reversal original - B-wind
      Master 4119 Film: positive - 16 mm - b&w - silent - reversal original - B-wind

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    You do not require further permission from the Museum to access this archival media.
    Copyright
    United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    Conditions on Use
    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum places no restrictions on use of this material. You do not require further permission from the Museum to reproduce or use this film footage.

    Keywords & Subjects

    Administrative Notes

    Film Provenance
    Robert Gessner was a Jewish American screenwriter and author of several books. He traveled to several European countries in 1934 and took films and photographs of his trip. His son, Peter, donated the collection to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in November 2014.
    Note
    The original Kodak film contains a 1934/54 date code [plus/circle]

    Robert Gessner published a book in 1936 about his overseas travels called "Some of my Best Friends Are Jews".

    On page 33, he writes: "Overnight from Paris is a summer camp for the children of French workers. Through the International Red Relief, an organization for the aid of political refugees, and the World Committee Against Fascist Oppression in Germany a number of German children have been quartered in the camp. It is on the Ile de Ré, off the coast of La Rochelle, a beautiful provincial island where the sun is healing and the tides roll. [...] They have divided their ranks into sections and each section carries the name and banner of a fighter against fascism, and they play their games under these banners." Gessner names three of these German refugee children, quartered at the camp amongst the children of French communists: Eric, a young German Jew who had been tormented by his Nazi teacher and whose entire family subsequently left the country; Kurt, whose mother was in a concentration camp and whose father was 'somewhere in the Saar'; and Karl, whose parents were both imprisoned by the Nazis for Communist politics and who had subsequently lived on the street with his younger brother and then in a German orphanage, where they were bullied and beaten by the Aryan orphans. They then escaped the orphanage.

    On pages 35-38, Gessner describes walking through the Marais, also known as the Pletzl, a Jewish neighborhood of Paris since 1881. Gessner relates an extended conversation he had with a Jew whom he calls Lloyd George II, after the English politician David Lloyd George, for his short stature and because he "was one of those typical ghetto politicians who are always 'fixing troubles.'" This is the man at 01:04:35. Gessner describes meeting him in a cafe in this neighborhood, and says that he, "folded his paper and pulled off his pince-nez."

    The camp was originally founded as a Communist camp for the children of Parisian workers: "In the meantime, the city's Communist Oeuvre de Vacances Populaires Enfantines (OVPE) had built its own rural utopia amidst the fresh, pine-scented winds of the Charente-Maritime: 'The air of the colonie, filled with the scents of the sea and the woods, is absolutely pure and possesses all the qualities necessary to cure the little lungs of our kids, who, for the rest of the year, are forced to breathe the smoke from the factories of our industrial city.... We must insure the health [of our children] from infancy onward so that they may better resist the vicissitudes and evils which await all workers under the capitalist regime." (Page 6 of a book entitled "Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880-1960" by Laura Lee Downs.) In the mid-1920s, the camp was administered by Émile Dutilleul, a French Communist politician, member of the PCF (Parti Communiste Français), and parliamentary deputy.
    Film Source
    Mr. Peter Gessner
    File Number
    Legacy Database File: 6040
    Record last modified:
    2024-02-21 08:04:32
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn1005055

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