A screening of the the 2018 documentary film The Jewish Wedding followed by a discussion on approaching memory through old home movies. The film is based on a "home movie" of my grandparents' wedding, the only known pre-Holocaust footage of an obliterated Frisian Jewish community. During the Holocaust, Friesland's vibrant Jewish community was forever obliterated. It is one of the starkest examples of how the Holocaust decimated and irreparably changed Dutch Jewry. That is why the surfacing of this unique "home movie" from 1939 showing the wedding of a Jewish couple in Friesland has been generating remarkable reactions from international media and historians over the past five years.
The silent, black-and-white film became the subject of a special aired in January 2017 by Friesland's public broadcaster, Omrop Fryslân. All the region's main dailies reported on it, as did some national publications. Placed on YouTube by the Frisian Film Archive at the same time, it received tens of thousands of hits, becoming one of the archive's most-watched videos ever. Soon Israeli and Dutch Television channels broadcasted articles about the wedding. In April 2018, a Dutch book titled The Jewish Wedding was published, chronicling the fate of all the wedding participants. Soon the home movie found itself screened in the background of an Italian opera titled "Job". A month later, Omrop Fryslân broadcasted a four-part documentary series in which the couple's children follow their parents escape route from the Netherlands after the wedding. The series was then made into a feature documentary film "The Jewish Wedding", featured in international film festivals. April 2020 even saw the premiere of a theatre play based on my grandparents' wartime story.
My father and his two sisters handed the film documenting their parents wedding over to the Frisian Film Archive after finding it in their late mother's suitcase in 2008. They had hung onto it for nearly a decade to come to terms with it. Just a year after filming, the people in the movie would come under the Nazi occupation that decimated the Frisian Jewish community, along with 75 percent of Dutch Jews - the highest death rate in occupied Western Europe. While few of their relatives and guests survived, my grandparents plotted the escape that saw them survive against all odds. They escaped the Netherlands in 1942, through France and Spain to Jamaica. My grandfather Barend Boers enlisted to fight with the Allies, while his wife, my grandmother Mimi Dwinger Boers, volunteered to work for the British War Office. Barend participated in the liberation of the Netherlands in 1944 as part of a Dutch brigade that fought embedded within the Canadian army. The home movie's appeal is not just its rarity and the light it shines on a doomed community. For our family, the film has a far more personal significance - it is a highly emotional opportunity to see our relatives a few years before most of them were murdered by the Nazis.

Annet Huisman (1961) works for the regional broadcast station Omrop Fryslân for over 20 years as a documentary make and recently also as editor in chief. Initially educated and working as a drama teacher, later in life she chose for the realism of documentary film making. She experienced reality being as fascinating as drama. FryslânDOK is the documentary program of Omrop Fryslân that produces films on human interest, but also political, historical, and cultural subjects. B roadcasting is both regional and national. Her films were often nominated and she won prizes for Best Documentary at the Noordelijk Film Festival.

Eyal Boers is an Israeli film director, producer, and researcher. His Ph.D. degree was received from Tel Aviv University in 2022. Boers authored the thesis "The Jew in Dutch cinema: images, stereotypes and national identity". Boers wrote, produced, and directed the short film A Lone Soldier (2007) and the documentaries Classmates of Anne Frank (2008) and Live or Die in Entebbe (2012). Boers is head of the film and television track at Ariel University's School of Communication and was the chairman of the Israel Film Council from 2018 till 2022.

Please book your free ticket for this event here: https://msa2023newcastle.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets