April 15th is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. To mark this important day our adult education committee would like to invite you to a showing of movie that received the Yad Vashem Award at the Jerusalem International Film Festival in 2008 for artistic achievement in a Holocaust related film.

 

The movie, "The Green Dumpster Mystery", tells the story of the filmmaker, Tal Haim Yoffe who, traveling on his scooter through Tel Aviv, finds a discarded box of old photographs in a green dumpster. This docu-detective film slowly unwinds a family history, beginning in Lodz, Poland, and traveling through the Siberian Gulag, a Samarkand sugar plant, a Ha'apala ship, and the battlefields of the Sinai Peninsula. Like Daniel Mendelsohn's bestseller The Lost and David Ofek's film No. 17 is Anonymous, this tightly-paced tour de force vividly evokes the now-extinguished lives of an anonymous - but typical - Israeli family.

 

Uri Klein of the Israeli newspaper wrote in his review, "One of the best Israeli films of recent times. In an ostensibly light tone, which balances the serious subjects in the film - history and memory, Holocaust and bereavement - the film tells the story of the director himself who, as he rode his scooter through South Tel Aviv, found a stash of old photographs in a dumpster. In the wake of this find, he sets out on a quest to find the people in the photo. Gradually, as in a very good thriller, in which secrets are revealed with increasing dramatic and emotional force, the director sets the stage for an Israeli family saga. Yoffe succeeds in digressing from a personal story into a drama with symbolic power. This is a serious, complex and important work."

 

Following the 50-minute movie, we will have the opportunity for discussion and a short memorial service.

I hope you will join us for this evening of learning and remembrance.