Jewish film festival returns with world premiere

As a 4-year-old, Shony Alex Braun was lost in a Romanian forest until a passer-by found him and brought him to her camp. That’s where he first heard the music of a violin.

At 10, Braun performed a violin concert for Bucharest public radio and had a pretty clear idea of his future.

“When I was 13, I finished conservatory, and I was ready to go on tour,” Braun said. “However, a man named Hitler thought it different.”

In May 1944, Braun, his parents, three brothers and two sisters were put on a train bound for Auschwitz, the first of four camps in which he’d be imprisoned. Different melodies came to the teenager, “over and over and over,” inspired by all of the pain he saw.

Braun kept those melodies in his head until he was liberated and could write them all down for what would become “Symphony of the Holocaust.” That composition shares its name with the documentary that’s celebrating its world premiere at 7 p.m. Saturday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as part of the Jewish Nevada Film Festival.

Rejuvenating a festival

Its predecessor, the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival, was a regular highlight of the local moviegoing calendar for 19 years. Then COVID-19 hit, and what had been an annual gathering morphed into a series of virtual screenings. Festival director Joshua Abbey had no plans to return to in-person events.

By that point, the statewide organization Jewish Nevada was in talks with Abbey about taking over the festival, says Neil Popish, program director at the Jewish Community Center of Southern Nevada. With Abbey moving out of town, this year’s incarnation, scheduled for Saturday through Feb. 4 at Brenden Theatres in the Palms, is the first to bear the new name.

“Most people in this community have just missed (having) a film festival,” says Popish, who worked closely with Abbey for years and put together online screenings with him.

In August, Jewish Nevada and the Jewish Community Center hosted a sold-out screening of “Golda,” in which Helen Mirren portrays former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. “And that,” Popish says, “sort of gave us the OK that people are ready for this.”

For his first year in charge of the rechristened festival, Popish wanted to keep things small, focusing on “Symphony of the Holocaust” and five other films:

— Actress Mariette Hartley and her husband, comic Jerry Sroka, look at dating as seniors in Hollywood in “Our (Almost Completely True) Story” (7 p.m. Jan. 31).

— The Nazis’ attempted cover-up of a Polish death camp is exposed in “Deadly Deception at Sobibor” (7 p.m. Feb. 1).

— The comic great is celebrated in the documentary “Remembering Gene Wilder” (7 p.m. Feb. 3).

— A 92-year-old tells her Modern Orthodox great-grandson she was a nurse for the Nazis at Auschwitz and has been posing as a Jewish refugee ever since in “The Last” (1 p.m. Feb. 4), from Las Vegas-based writer-director Jeff Lipsky.

— And “Israel Swings for Gold” (4 p.m. Feb. 4) follows the Israeli baseball team’s Olympics debut in 2021.

Of the last film, which was filmed by team members, Popish says it’s only become more important since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. “All they do is encounter anti-Semitism in the Olympic village, and they’re just taken aback. … I think it’s more relevant today than it was just three months ago.”

“Symphony of the Holocaust,” though, was so powerful that Popish scheduled the festival around it after Rabbi Bradley Tecktiel at Midbar Kodesh Temple brought it to his attention and suggested a Holocaust Remembrance Day screening.

Not ‘another typical Holocaust documentary’

Director Greg DeHart was working on a project with Dr. Noreen Green, the founding artistic director and conductor of the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, when she mentioned Braun’s story.

DeHart immediately reached out to Dinah Braun Griffin, who told him her father’s dream, before he died in 2002, was to play “Symphony of the Holocaust” at the Auschwitz Memorial to bring beauty to such a terrible place. Her goal was to track down Braun’s violin, which had sold years ago for around a quarter of a million dollars, and have someone play it there in his stead.

“And I thought,” DeHart says, “ ‘Hey, can I tag along for that?’ ”

From there, the documentary grew to involve Griffin’s Christian husband and their kids, the German violin restorer who befriended Braun, and the Armenian violinist living in Mexico who’d been loaned the prized instrument.

DeHart is a veteran of documentaries for the History Channel, back in the days before it went all-in on reality shows when its focus on World War II led some to refer to it as the “Hitler Channel.”

“I didn’t want to make another typical Holocaust documentary,” he says, “and I knew that this was a great vehicle for that. Just the way that he wrote the symphony, it ends with ‘joy’ as the last movement.”

Braun speaks for himself in “Symphony of the Holocaust” through interviews he conducted with the USC Shoah Foundation. In them, he shares his memory of Josef Mengele sorting his family, deciding which members would be immediately killed, upon their arrival at Auschwitz.

Once there, Braun’s job was to transport bodies from the gas chambers to the crematorium. In Thil, France, he labored in a munitions factory. In Kochendorf, Germany, it was the salt mines. He was in Dachau when it was liberated on April 29, 1945.

“His personality was just so kind,” DeHart says of those interviews with Braun. “He told his story so well. And he had this kind of hopeful gleam in his eye. And I realized, ‘OK, there is some hope in this.’ ”

Griffin and her daughter, Sierra Rechnitz, will join DeHart and executive producer Garrett Sutton for a Q&A following Saturday’s screening. Tickets are $15, while a festival pass for all six films is $54; see jewishnevada.org/filmfestival. “Symphony of the Holocaust” also will be available starting Saturday on Sunn Stream, Sutton’s Reno-based streaming service.

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on X.