Awards
International Latino Film Festival
San Francisco Bay Area 2005
Best Documentary
Throughout the early twentieth century thousands of European Jews sailed to Mexico looking for opportunity and escaping increasing persecution at home. A small group made their way north to the border town of Tijuana. Tijuana Jews, is a one-hour documentary and a personal exploration of this community that blended Jewish and Mexican cultures and customs in an unlikely place and time.
Growing up Jewish in Mexico, director Isaac Artenstein found reactions of surprise, even disbelief, from many people north of the border: they had no idea there were Jews in Mexico, and especially in Tijuana. Tijuana's dark legend continues to fire up the imagination with stories of free-flowing liquor, cheap narcotics, beautiful senoritas and black velvet paintings. Tijuana Jews is an authentic and living testimony set against conceptions and misconceptions of this near-mythic border city.
The members of the Tijuana Jewish community are immigrants and their descendants from Eastern Europe --- Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from countries like Poland, Russia, Lithuania and Rumania. There are also Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, as well as Arabic Jews from Syria and Lebanon.
The interviews in Tijuana Jews provide insights into the experiences of local pioneers who created the first Jewish temple in Tijuana and subsequent congregations such as the Maguen David, The Hatikvah, and the Centro Social Israelita de Tijuana. They also bring to life Tijuana's history beginning with Prohibition in the 1920s when Tijuana gained much of its colorful reputation. This border town boasted the world’s longest bar (one city-block long) for thirsty Americans, the Agua Caliente Casino, the Race Track, and Revolution Avenue.
For the film's director, Tijuana was also a place for weddings, bar mitzavahs, graduations and helping out at his father's store on Revolution Avenue. The first-person narration takes the audience in an intimate journey, encountering and re-encountering people and places, while reflecting on a life-long experience that builds to a dynamic present that includes the transformation of Tijuana into the busiest border crossing in the world, and the migration of many Tijuana Jewish families to the American side, adding yet another layer to the rich mosaic that is Tijuana Jews.
Article in jewishsightseeing.com
Article in the San Diego Union
Article in Jewish Journal (They Got Jews in Mexico?)
The National Center For Jewish Film
Brandeis University, Lown 102, MS053, Waltham MA 02454
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