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Daniel Gold and his father shortly after the war

DANIEL GOLD: HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR MEETING

Hidden by his parents as the Nazis rounded up the elderly and the children in their Ghetto, they were unable to prevent their own incarceration in Dachau Concentration camp.

When the war ended Daniel Gold, was reunited with his father but his mother perished in the camp.  He and his father made their way as refugees to Israel.  Eventually he joined the IDF as part of his compulsory military service and became a fighter pilot, fightingin both the 1967 and 1973 wars.  Following his military service he enrolled at a University and eventually rose to becoming a Professor of Medical Microbiology.  He is touring New Zealand, telling his story to high school students and re-acquainting them to the evils of intolerance and the Holocaust.  He will be addressing the society at a public meeting in Christchurch.

He has a remarkable and fascinating story to tell.

Please register your interest for security and catering purposes (see event contact details)

Daniel Gold and his father shortly after the war

DANIEL GOLD: HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR MEETING

Hidden by his parents as the Nazis rounded up the elderly and the children in their Ghetto, they were unable to prevent their own incarceration in Dachau Concentration camp.

When the war ended Daniel Gold, was reunited with his father but his mother perished in the camp.  He and his father made their way as refugees to Israel.  Eventually he joined the IDF as part of his compulsory military service and became a fighter pilot, fightingin both the 1967 and 1973 wars.  Following his military service he enrolled at a University and eventually rose to becoming a Professor of Medical Microbiology.  He is touring New Zealand, telling his story to high school students and re-acquainting them to the evils of intolerance and the Holocaust.  He will be addressing the society at a public meeting in Christchurch.

He has a remarkable and fascinating story to tell.

Daniel Gold and his father shortly after the war

DANIEL GOLD: HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR MEETING

Hidden by his parents as the Nazis rounded up the elderly and the children in their Ghetto, they were unable to prevent their own incarceration in Dachau Concentration camp.

When the war ended Daniel Gold, was reunited with his father but his mother perished in the camp.  He and his father made their way as refugees to Israel.  Eventually he joined the IDF as part of his compulsory military service and became a fighter pilot, fightingin both the 1967 and 1973 wars.  Following his military service he enrolled at a University and eventually rose to becoming a Professor of Medical Microbiology.  He is touring New Zealand, telling his story to high school students and re-acquainting them to the evils of intolerance and the Holocaust.  He will be addressing the society at a public meeting in Christchurch.

He has a remarkable and fascinating story to tell.

JIFF is the home of the most comprehensive range of Israeli and Jewish-themed films in Australia and New Zealand. The films premiere in our annual three-week film festival in November or our newly established Holocaust Film Series in March. JIFF is building on the long and proud 24-year history of Jewish film festivals in Australia.

Son of Saul (2015)

In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival upon trying to salvage from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son. 107 minutes.

Cannes Film Festival 2015

Ghent International Film Festival 2015

Hamburg Film Festival 2015

Hawaii International Film Festival 2015

London Film Festival 2015

Sarajevo Film Festival 2015

Join us for a highly informative and interactive presentation by acclaimed Professor Yoram Barak on a survey of the available evidence, observations and hypotheses on how Alzheimer’s Disease might be prevented. This is the second in a 2-part series of lectures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Yoram Barak is an assistant professor of Psychiatry at the Sackler School of Medicine of Tel-Aviv University, and director of the Psychogeriatric Department at the Abarbanel Mental Health Center. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at the Sackler School of Medicine, he became an Israel Medical Scientific Council Specialist in Psychiatry in 1993, and was awarded a Masters in Health Administration from Ben-Gurion University of Beer-Sheva, Israel in 2004.

Dr. Barak is also a consultant for the National Multiple Sclerosis Center in Israel and a special consultant on Positive Psychology for the Israel Defense Forces. He was president of the Israeli Association of Old-Age Psychiatry, and is currently on the editorial board of the Israel Journal of Psychiatry and the Open Psychiatry Journal. Research interests include multiple sclerosis, cancer, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive–compulsive disorder, suicide and geriatric psychiatry. He has published extensively in these areas, and is author and co-author of over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles.

He is currently on Sabbatical and teaching at the Otago University School of Medicine in Christchurch.

VENUE:  Northwood Villa Clubrooms, Northwood Villas Cres, off O’Neill Ave, Northwood, Christchurch 
WHEN:  2pm, Sunday, July 3, 2016 

ADMISSION: Please bring a plate of finger food, we’d be grateful if you could avoid pork or seafood products.

FEEL FREE TO INVITE YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY

If you’ve not heard of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, you’ll wonder how that could have been once you’ve seen what he does in this film. For dance aficionados, this is surely the most anticipated artist portrait since Wim Wenders’ Pina.

“A spectacular and celebratory investigation of a modern dancer’s creative process, this documentary tracks the four decades-long career of renowned choreographer Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company. Thoughtfully and painstakingly researched, the film is packed with visually arresting archival footage from every stage of Naharin’s professional (and personal) life…

Choreographed pieces move in kinetic bursts from the rehearsal studio to the stage and, in interviews, dancers who’ve worked with him and colleagues from different periods offer insights in terms both admiring and blunt. Naharin is similarly expressive – about… the joys of physical expression, his struggles to convey his vision to those tasked with embodying it and the dance-world backdrop against which he developed his singular choreographic style and movement language, known as Gaga.

Heymann, a veteran documentarian whose filmography includes an earlier work about Naharin, skillfully constructs a portrait from these elements, methodically adding layers and sometimes revisiting previously seen footage, arming the viewer with new revelations and a more complicated understanding.” — Lynn Rapoport, San Francisco International Film Festival

Investigative journalism meets conspiracy thriller as Alex Gibney (Going Clear, NZIFF15) goes on the trail of Stuxnet, the extraordinary computer virus that metastasised around the world before it arrived at its target, Iranian nuclear facilities, and performing its mission: exploding uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

Undeterred by muzzled officials, the indomitable Gibney shows how Stuxnet – or ‘Olympic Games’, as its architects called it – was cooked up covertly by the US and Israel, creating a new level of virus complexity and a new class of weapon. One of Gibney’s sources, dramatised as a composite individual and played by a digitally reconstituted actor (one of many striking visual effects), says the worm may never have come to public attention had it not been for a unilateral Israeli move to recalibrate Stuxnet’s code and accelerate its impact. A wider operation had to be abandoned, and Tehran retaliated in kind, attacking US institutions with malware and parading its own burgeoning ‘cyber army’.

Gibney manages not only to illuminate in plain terms how Stuxnet worked, but to also issue a powerful warning about the Pandora’s box it opens. Echoing ideas explored in his WikiLeaks documentary We Steal Secrets, Gibney argues that in the face of an emerging cyber-conflict threat, which is analogous to that of nuclear weapons many decades ago, international norms and rules of engagement must be developed outside the shadows of secrecy and denial. — Toby Manhire

“Zero Days is reminiscent of that scene in Skyfall when Q tells 007 that he can do more damage with his laptop before his morning cup of Earl Grey than Bond can do in a year.” — Nicholas Barber, BBC

The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt left her indelible imprint on 20th-century thought by coining the concept of the ‘banality of evil’ when reporting on the 1963 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. This spirited documentary illuminates that often abused idea and draws a larger picture of Arendt’s often conflicted engagement with the defining phenomena of her era – and maybe ours too.

Richly illustrated with historical footage, Vita Activa offers an intimate portrait of Arendt’s life and work – both deeply informed by the aftermath of World War I, the rise of Nazi Germany and its systematic elimination of European Jews.

“Directed by Israeli documentarian Ada Ushpiz, who has degrees in philosophy and history as well as filmmaking experience, Vita Activa closely examines Arendt’s ‘active life’ with the goal of putting us inside her formative experiences, the better to reveal who she was and where her attitudes came from. There are interviews with old friends and academic experts and extensive use of filmed interviews Arendt herself gave, as well as the effective reading of excerpts from her essays and letters by actress Alison Darcy. Though the talk is smart and constant here, Vita Activa also benefits from the director’s sharp eye for effective, often rarely seen newsreel and home-movie footage.” — Kenneth Turan, LA Times

“There are moments in Vita Activa, an urgent and often startling documentary from Israeli director Ada Ushpiz, where I could feel her trying to reach across the decades and talk to us.” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon

A NZFOI Wellington Outing – Tuesday 9th May 2017 6.15pm @ Penthouse Cinema Brooklyn. 

(Meet from 5.45pm for drinks first if you can)

Come along and see the movie “Denial” with other NZFOI folk.  Tickets only $10.

Did you know that the Simon Weisenthal Centre’s work now is primarily geared to countering holocaust denial and pursuing holocaust deniers like David Irving. Consider what does it take legally to do this? What is the holocaust evidence?

Movie Synopsis:

A Jewish university professor in Jewish studies at an American university named Deborah E. Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) cites historian David Irving in a book about Holocaust deniers. Pretty straight forward you would think. An open and shut case over the death of 6 million Jews. Think Yad Vashem, Auschwitz… Irving then accuses her of libel and brings an action against her. Now the tables are turned and she is the one being accused. The key issue becomes a legal battle for historical truth. As the burden of proof is placed on the accused, Lipstadt and her legal team must fight to prove the truth of the holocaust. How would you answer this question????

RSVP Joanna Moss at joannamoss@nzfoi.org or phone (04) 802 5956 or (022) 154 7865

You’re invited to a free screening of the movie “Woman in Gold.”

It is the story of  Maria Altmann, an elderly Jewish refugee living in Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles, who, together with her young lawyer, Randy Schoenberg, fought the government of Austria for almost a decade to reclaim Gustav Klimt’s iconic painting of her aunt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was stolen from her relatives by the Nazis in Vienna just prior to World War II. Altmann took her legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled on the case Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004).

It stars Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany, Max Irons, Charles Dance, Elizabeth McGovern, and Jonathan Pryce.

A strong cast, an absorbing story.

The film scores 4.7 out of five on Amazon reviews.

Please bring a plate of finger food.  The library will be open so be sure to bring your returns.

Sunday, 2pm, May 14.

Northwood Villa Clubrooms, Northwood Villas Crescent, Christchurch, 8051.