The Last Musician of Auschwitz, executive produced by Emily Blavatnik and Danny Cohen, is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of Jewish cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and other musicians at the Auschwitz concentration camp who used music as a form of resistance and testimony. The film features first-person accounts from Holocaust survivors and includes new interpretations of musical works written by victims, highlighting themes of loss, cultural memory, and the resilience of the human spirit amidst the horrors of the camp. Musicians from the Phoenix Chamber Ensemble of the Blavatnik Chamber Music Series will perform 45 minutes of music from the film, and other pieces played by prisoners at Auschwitz, before the screening. The special event will take place at the Center for Jewish History in New York on Thursday, October 30.
The award for Best Full-Length Documentary went to Letter to David by Tom Shoval, which is about the hostage David Cunio, who worked with Shoval on one of his first films. The film was produced by Nancy Spielberg. Shoval read a message from Cunio’s wife, Sharon Aloni-Cunio, who was kidnapped with David along with their daughters and was released, and who pleaded for the public to continue fighting for her husband’s release. The Blavatnik Family Foundation is proud to support Letter to David and congratulates Tom Shoval, Nancy Spielberg, Maya Fischer, and all those involved with the making of this deeply moving and powerful film.
For more than 3,000 Israeli families, the gift of infant formula from Colel Chabad means more than nourishment; it’s one weight off their shoulders during their hardest days. Addressing the issue of the high cost of infant formula in Israel, Colel Chabad, which is the oldest continually operating charity in Israel, has partnered with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, the Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York, the Blavatnik Food Bank, and the Ted Arison Family Foundation to provide infant formula to working mothers in Israel. This initiative is part of Colel Chabad’s National Food Security Initiative, which it conducts in cooperation with the Welfare and Social Affairs Ministry.
When a successful organization has been in existence for almost 250 years, helping those in need, one is understandably reluctant to change its name. After all, why spoil a good thing? Such is the case with Colel Chabad, the oldest continually operating charity in Israel, founded in 1788 by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Colel Chabad has become one of Israel’s most essential organizations, offering a broad range of programs, which include soup kitchens, daycare centers, medical rehabilitation centers, mental health clinics, and much more. Its largest program is its Food Security Initiative, part of the Blavatnik Food Bank of Israel. It has developed a partnership with the Israeli government that reaches 40,000 families each month, helping to ensure their food security. Food security is defined as the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.
Backed by The Zone of Interest funder Access, the doc, which was made by Two Rivers Media, follows Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who, along with other victims of Auschwitz, played and created music amid the terrors of the Holocaust. It reveals how despite living in the most brutal and dehumanizing of situations, prisoners were secretly composing music whilst in the camps. Co-EPs Emily Blavatnik and Danny Cohen added: “Preserving the memories, stories and truths of the Holocaust is critically important. It’s something that the Blavatnik Family and Access Industries are profoundly committed to. This documentary and its musical testimonies resonate deeply when experienced in a shared, collective setting, which is key to furthering holocaust remembrance.”
Tom Shoval’s documentary A Letter To David, which is playing in Berlinale Special, marks a return to the festival for the Israeli filmmaker - but not in a circumstance he could have imagined when his first feature, Youth, played in Panorama back in 2013. Shoval described A Letter To David as a “multi-layered cinematic letter” to his friend David Cunio, who was taken hostage by Hamas with his brother Ariel from the Nir Oz kibbutz on October 7, 2023. A Letter To David is produced by Alona Refua, Maya Fischer and Roy Bareket of Israel’s Green Productions and Nancy Spielberg of US-based Playmount Productions. It was financed by Israeli broadcaster Hot8, Israeli fund The New Fund For Cinema And Television, as well as Jewish focused philanthropic organisations The Blavatnik Family Foundation, Boston Rose and Jewish Story Partners.
The Last Musician of Auschwitz, made by Two Rivers Media for BBC Arts, co-funded by Access, and executive produced by the Blavatnik Family Foundation Co-Chair Emily Blavatnik, is a remarkable film. It finds something new to say about Auschwitz and does it in a moving, life-affirming way, without ever sparing us the horror of the Holocaust. Yet, incredibly, amid the terror there was music. It was performed and even composed in the camp, and for a fortunate few this enabled their survival. Music was a lifeline and a way of resisting.
At 99, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the last surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz — her son tells her extraordinary story to the Financial Times. On January 27, the BBC will mark Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau with a wide range of programming, including the documentary, “The Last Musician of Auschwitz,” executive produced by Foundation Co-Chair Emily Blavatnik and Access Entertainment President Danny Cohen.
For the philanthropic family, which fled the USSR in 1978-1979, the topic is a personal matter, but Alex Blavatnik tells eJP that he hopes the story resonates further. The Blavatnik Family Foundation, joined by the Arcadia Fund and the David Berg Foundation, is working to change that, funding a new digital archive — Refuseniks & Activists — that is dedicated to the Soviet Jewry movement and the Refuseniks, those Soviet Jews whose applications for exit visas were refused and who were then forced into horrid conditions for the sins of being Jewish and Zionist.
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The Blavatnik Archive is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to preserving and disseminating materials that contribute to the study of 20th-century Jewish and world history, with a special emphasis on World War I, World War II, and Soviet Russia.
