c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) A PBS-TV program scheduled for broadcast on Tuesday (Aug. 30) is an extraordinary study of how two families, one Orthodox Jewish and the other Polish Catholic, confront sacred memories, a shared bitter past, and most importantly, how they encounter each other 60 years after the end of the Holocaust and World War II.

Sound boring and cliche-laden? Just another touchy-feely, let’s-all-be-friends show? Not a chance.

“Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust” does not wrap up all the painful emotions into a tidy package. Instead, the 90-minute Oren Rudavsky/Menachem Daum film raises disturbing questions and forces a reexamination of some fundamental beliefs.

Daum, a middle-aged American Orthodox Jew, earned a doctorate from Fordham University. Remarkably, his aged father and father-in-law, both Holocaust survivors from Poland, also live in New York City. Daum’s two adult sons, Tzvi Dovid and Akiva, reside in Israel studying Jewish religious texts at a Jerusalem yeshiva. Daum and his wife, Rifka, have 14 grandchildren and are “still counting.”

So what’s his problem? Why did Daum make a gripping film about the horrific past at a time when things are going so well for his large family?

The answer? Menachem Daum is caught between the traumatized Holocaust generation of his father and father-in-law who witnessed the physical destruction of the thousand-year-old Polish Jewish community and his proud Israeli sons, filled with distrust for the outside (non-Jewish) world. These sons seek to live an isolated religious life in Jerusalem, the spiritual and political capital of the Jewish people.

As a young man, Menachem was influenced by the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach who taught there is “one God, and we are all brothers and sisters.” Daum loves his sons who have maintained the family’s Orthodox traditions, but he is upset by their hostility to anyone not Jewish.

Daum recognizes that preaching about mutual respect and tolerance will not change the opinions of his father and father-in-law and his sons. That might have been the end of the story except for one startling fact: Menachem’s father-in-law, Chaim Federman, and his two brothers were successfully hidden from the German occupiers of Poland for 28 months during World War II. During that period, the three brothers lived in a dark pit on a Polish farm covered by many layers of hay.

They were fed and cared for by the farm’s owners, a Catholic family who faced death if the Germans discovered the hiding place. Of course, the Germans targeted every Jew for death.

Incredibly, Daum discovered that Honorata and Wojciech Mucha, the couple who saved the three Jews, are still alive and live with their extended family on the same farm in rural Poland.

Daum brings his wife and their two sons to the Mucha homestead where they tearfully invoke Jewish prayers on the exact spot where Mrs. Daum’s father was hidden. The remarkable conversation between the two families is a highpoint of the program. As you watch the film, focus your attention on the faces of the Jews and Catholics as a remarkable story of courage, fear, disbelief and affection unfolds.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Thanks to the magic of cell phones, Honorata, the hider, living in Poland, and Chaim, the hidden, living in the United States, talk to one another after six decades.

The Muchas never fully explain why they risked their lives to save three Jewish young men: “Nobody would hide Jews, but we hid them.” However, they are irritated that the survivors, after moving to America, never once wrote them a word of thanks.

A year later, Menachem and his family return to the farm accompanied by his eldest granddaughter, and Shevach Weiss, the Israeli ambassador to Poland. It is a special emotional moment for the Daums and the Muchas. That’s because Weiss, himself a native of Poland, presents the “Righteous Gentile” Award given by the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum only to those who actually saved a Jewish life during World War II. It is an overdue acknowledgement of the Muchas’ heroism.

At program’s end, Chaim Federman regrets he did not maintain contact with the Muchas, and Menachem’s sons clearly recognize they would never have been born if the Muchas had not hidden their grandfather. Their mother recites a Jewish teaching: “A person saved is a world saved.”

Many political and religious leaders endlessly prattle today about “family values” and “sanctity of life.” Watch this superb program and see what those terms really mean.

MO/JL END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo from the documentary.