Among the films at this week's 9th annual Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival
is the first ever full length documentary to chronicle the 30-year struggle to free the Jews of Soviet Russia.
Produced and directed by an up-and-coming American filmmaker by the name of Laura Bialis, "Refusenik"
takes viewers on a journey through modern Jewish history, starting with reports in the 1960's of rampant anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
While information was scant at first, news of professional and educational limits on Jews behind the Iron curtain as well as severely restricted freedom of movement and prohibitions on Jewish immigration soon sparked a protest movement in the West that crossed cultural, religious and ethnic lines.
On the other side of the curtain, courageous Jewish activists known as "refuseniks" risked arrest and long jail sentences to publicly criticize their totalitarian government and its anti-Semitic policies.
The movie's poster
Told from the perspective of movement activists from the Soviet Union and the West, "Refusenik" is the moving story of people who set out against a seemingly implacable foe and eventually triumphed against all odds. In 30 years the movement succeeded not only in freeing one and-a-half million Soviet Jews, but also in putting the issue of Soviet human rights policy at the forefront of the American agenda.
Bialis, who won awards for her documentary on Holocaust-survivor turned civil rights activist Judy Meisel, "Tak for Alt", will present her new film alongside
former refusenik and former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky on Thursday, December 6, at the Jerusalem cinematheque, at 6:45 pm.
The film's world premier is one of a number of events being promoted by the Committee for the 40th Anniversary of the Soviet Jewish Struggle for Freedom, headed by Sharansky himself.
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