The Essential Link - Trailer
WINNER
Audience Award
2018 Philadelphia JFF
WINNER
Audience Award
Scottsdale International
Film Festival
WINNER
Audience Award
2018 New Hampshire JFF
2018 Santa Barbara International Film Festival
2017 Docaviv Film Festival
2018 LA Awareness
Film Festival
Mueseum of Tolerance
UN in Vienna
Berlin Jewish Film Festival
Ithaca Israeli Film Festival
The Essential Link:
The Story of Wilfrid Israel
2017 | 71 minutes | Translation: Hebrew, English, German, Russian
Wilfrid Israel, the owner of Berlin's largest department store and a member of one of Germany’s most prominent Jewish families at the time of Hitler’s rise to power, was one of the great saviors of Jews during the Holocaust.
He helped save thousands of Jewish children through the Kindertransport operation, and secured escape for hundreds of his employees and their family members from Nazi Germany.
The previously unknown story of this extraordinary man, becomes very personal as filmmaker Yonatan Nir takes us on an adventure as he searches for the mysterious hero, and the real reasons for his disappearance from history.
"Your film has an important educational value in the memorialization of the Holocaust and in endowing it to future generations.
- Shimon Peres
His true memory is, as" he would have wished it to be, in the hearts and lives of those he was able to save from destruction"
- Chaim Weizmann
“Never in my life have I come in contact with a being so noble, so strong or as selfless as Wilfrid Israel.”
- Albert Einstein