Exclusive Film Preview at the J this Summer!
AN ARTICLE OF HOPE: Thursday, August 19, 7:30 p.m.
A preview screening of the powerful new documentary film Includes discussion with the Director Dan Cohen and Producer Christopher G. Cowen.
An Article of Hope is the remarkable true story of Colonel Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first Astronaut and a tiny Torah from the Holocaust that he carried from the depths of hell to the heights of space.
Dawn is breaking on the morning of February 1, 2003 above West Texas. Suddenly the peace of the early morning is shattered by two loud bangs. The Space Shuttle Columbia is announcing its return home, causing sonic booms as it streaks across the sky at three times the speed of sound. The shuttle is speeding toward a Florida homecoming. But in an instant, onlookers below and controllers in Houston are stunned at what they see. Something has gone horribly wrong. The shuttle has broken up, vanished! Gone is its precious cargo of seven astronauts from around the world. Among them, Col. Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first Astronaut.
Also gone, an artifact that embodied the glory of the Shuttle’s mission and the despair of its demise: a tiny Torah scroll – smuggled into a concentration camp during the Holocaust; safeguarded by Joachim Joseph, a Holocaust survivor; and carried into space by Col. Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. It is a unique story that interweaves the heights of scientific achievement, the depths of a nation’s cruelty, the private grief of a boy who came of age during the Holocaust, and the public mourning of many nations in the aftermath of the Columbia Shuttle disaster. To fulfill the promise that a boy in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp made during the Holocaust – to use the Torah scroll to tell the world what happened in the camp – comes AN ARTICLE OF HOPE, an hour-long film exploring the journey of the Torah from pre-World War II Europe, to Israel, and then to space. Combining historical and ethical inquiry, the film reaches across faiths and nationalities to tell a truly human story.
$8 JCC members, $12 Public. Click here to register.