There's an old Borsht Belt joke about a shipwrecked Jew found alone after 10 years on a desert island. He shows his rescuers the crude shelter he built from driftwood and palms, then points to two other shacks. "Those are the synagogues" he says.
" But you're the only one here! Why two synagogues?", they ask in astonishment.
"Such a question!," he says. "One I pray in, the other I wouldn't be caught dead in!"
Maybe that explains why some American cities have at least two if not three different - Jewish film festivals - some even at the same time. Here in New York, it's even worse - we've got four!
There's the classic "Jewish Film Festival" organized each year by Fifth Avenue's prestigious Jewish Museum. Then there's "The Israel Film Festival" sponsored by Israel's friends. Not to be outdone, the Upper Westside's steadfast liberals sponsor the so-called "Other Israel Film Festival" devoted to films by and about Israel's increasingly schizophrenic Arab population. Last, but decidedly not least, there's the Sephardic Federation's "Sephardic Jewish Film Festival" which treats us to a week of documentaries and features zooming in on the world's more exotic Jews - not only Jews of pre-inquisition Spanish origin, but Yemenites, Ethiopians, Indians and the like.
Some critics say that this plethora of Jewish film festivals merely means one competes with the other. But, the fact is, each festival has its own individual merits. And perhaps, the more the merrier. Still, for my money, The Sephardic Film Festival - which opened at East 16th Street's Jewish Historic Center on February 5th and continues till February 12th - is the one that focuses best on that most basic of all Jewish traits; the will to survive as Jews against all odds.
Take young Boston director Sadia Shepard's "In Search of Bene Israel", a personalized look at the now tiny community of Jews from the area of Bombay who believe they are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel, shipwrecked in India more than 2000 years ago. Once numbering 25,000 (among them Shepard's own grandmother), Bombay's Children of Israel now number less than 5000; most having emigrated to Israel and elsewhere. Those who've remained in what is now correctly called Mumbai are steadfast in their customs and identity - they look like Indians, but study in Hebrew, praying and marrying among themselves and maintaining their unique Indian/Jewish culture. Among them, the man called "Uncle David", an elderly peasant who still lives in a small primitive Maharashtra village near Bombay, where Bombay's Jews first settled. There he and his immediate clan follow the ancient Bene Israel tradition of hand-making and selling cooking oil. "I will not leave," he says. "People return and want to see how we once lived, that we are still here."
There are even greater odds to overcome. Two other documentaries featured this year, "The Fire Within: Jews in the Amazonian Rainforest" and "About Sugarcane and Homecoming" tells the tales of Jews with actual ancestral roots in Spain who settled in South America and fight to maintain their Jewishness. One group - the Judios Mestizos of the Amazon are the children of Jewish colonist fathers and native mothers. The other, in Northeastern Brazil, believes it is descended from Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in the 15th century, but who still still follow traditional Jewish religion and rites even though it is not recognized by the Jewish establishment.
Ethiopian Jewish director, Shmuel Beru, now settled in Israel, offers us "Zrubavel", which pits the Ethiopian Jewish traditions of the older generation of black African immigrants against those of their grandchildren who will certainly remain Jews but want to assimilate with Israeli culture.
Moroccan born director Hassan Benjalloun offers a delightful sometimes funny, sometimes sad feature about the early 1960s exodus of Jews to Israel from a small Moroccan village. For the manager of the only bar in town it is time for panic. In Muslim Morocco, non-Muslims are the only ones he can legally sell to!
Yet ultimately many attempts to remain Jewish and remain in a native country fail. The most decisive is shown in Canadian Joe Balass's "Baghdad Twist" - a very personal compilation of archival film , home movies, family photos and a faceless interview with his mother who now lives in Montreal where she's never adjusted to the snow. Most of Iraq's 150,000 Jews, descendants of one of the oldest and most important Jewish communities in the Diaspora, left soon after Israel was established in 1948. Balass's parents were among the 14,000 or so who decided to remain - that is until 1967 when the Arabs lost the Six Day War and the Iraqi government began hanging Jews in the street. Still Mother Balass insists "We were Iraqi and we were Jews. We were Iraqi Jews."
(The 13th NY Sephardic Jewish Festival runs till February 12th at Sephardic House, 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011, tel 212 294-8350, www.americansephardicfederation.org .
Some films are being simultaneously shown at the JCC, 344 Amsterdam Avenue, NY and at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, at the Sunrise Cinema at 3701 NE 163rd Street, North Miami Beach, FL 33160)
