Romania/CZ -- Czech 9 Gates Festival in Bucharest

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

This year, the annual (and of late traveling)   9 Gates Festival of Czech Jewish Culture is being hosted in Bucharest, Romania.

The schedule includes:

EXHIBITIONS

Neighbors who Disappeared
The project Neighbors Who Disappeared provides young people (12-21 years old) with an opportunity to search for neighbors who "disappeared" from their neighborhood - particularly during the Second World War. Students and children in the same schools children go to today, and what were the reasons for their sudden departure.

Tribute to the Child Holocaust Victims
The second stage of the project called A Tribute to the Child Holocaust Victims addresses again young people aged 12-21 and proposes tht they work independently on the stories of people who lived with their neighbours in a harmony until WWII and who were then mostly marked, restricte, persecuted, and finally liquidated. This projct’s topic, however is in the first place the life of the children and youngsters in the same community where children-participants live today.

FILM
Short Long Journey, Czech Republic, 2009, 82 min.
Director: Martin Hanzlicek
Producers: Fedor Gal, Jarmila Polakova
„About people, not only about Jews, about the evil in us, not only about the holocaust, about the present not only about the past“
In April 1945 Vojtech Gal was murdered on the way from Sachsenhausen to Schwerin. In April 2008 his son walked the same route in an attempt to find his father’s grave and leave a testimony. He was accompanied by friends, film makers and fellow pilgrims. They did not understand everything they came across. They could not comprehend some of the people with whom they talked. But it never occurred to them even for a moment that they were travelling without aim and meaning. They give harsh personal witness of their journey, anticipating neither agreement nor tolerance.

Diamonds of the Night, Cehoslovacia, 1964, 64 min.
Director: Jan Nemec
Screenplay: Arnost Lustig
Diamonds of the Night is set in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Two Jewish youths escape from a concentration camp-bound train. Captured by local peasants on a charge of stealing bread, the boys are sentenced to a firing squad. The men prepare to execute the boys, but simply laugh as they walk away instead of executing them. The ending is ambiguous: The men either actually spared the boys, or they could be walking into the afterlife.

MUSIC
Concert Naches
The Klezmer band NACHES interprets the traditional and the not so traditional folk music of the East European Jews. The band has taken part of many important Klezmer festivals, for example Klez- Fest in the UK.

For a full schedule click HERE