“Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire”: Film Screening and Discussion
Tue, April 14 at 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm
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In honor of Yom Hashoah, please join us for a special screening of Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, directed by member Oren Rudavsky: Eighty years after his liberation from Buchenwald, we seek to understand the man behind Elie Wiesel’s searing and widely read memoir Night. Told largely through his own words and eloquent voice, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire seeks to penetrate to the heart of the known and unknown Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) – his passions, his conflicts and his legacy as one of the most public survivors of the trauma of the Holocaust. With unique access to personal archives, original interviews and employing hand painted animation, the film illuminates Wiesel’s biography as a survivor, writer, teacher and public figure.
Following the screening, please stay for a conversation between Elisha Wiesel, son of Elie Wiesel, director Oren Rudavsky, and Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky.
About Oren Rudavsky, Writer/Director/Producer
Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts grants. Rudavsky produced, directed and co-wrote the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People which was nominated for a Critics Choice Award. His film Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016. Colliding Dreams was broadcast on PBS in 2018. His NEH funded film A Life Apart: Hasidism in America was short-listed for the Academy Awards and broadcast on PBS in 1997 and his ITVS funded film Hiding and Seeking was nominated for an Independent Spirit award and was chosen for the PBS POV series. Both were co-directed with Menachem Daum. Rudavsky was the producer of media for the forty permanent film installations the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow which opened in 2013. In 2009 Rudavsky was Producer/Writer of the two-part series Time for School 3, a twelve-year longitudinal study examining the education of seven children in the developing world for the PBS series Wide Angle. In 2006, Oren completed The Treatment, his fiction feature as Producer/Writer/Director, starring Chris Eigeman, Ian Holm and Famke Janssen which was awarded Best Film in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded film Everything Seemed Possible along director and editor Ramón Rivera Moret, about an era of profound cultural and social change in Puerto Rico in the 1950s-1960s. Rudavsky is a long-time member of Ansche Chesed.
