Picture This

For 34 years, professor and Jewish film archivist Sharon Pucker Rivo ’61 has been on a cultural treasure hunt.

The good ship Exodus, a rusty Baltimore Harbor cruise boat refitted to carry 4,500 displaced European Jewish men, women and children to Palestine in 1947, was made famous in Otto Preminger’s 1960 film rendition of a novel by Leon Uris.

To see the historic Exodus, though, you would have to bypass Preminger’s opus and squint at a grainy bit of film that bounces erratically between color and black and white, catching glimpses of ocean, flashes of sky, maritime gear and coils of rigging.

The unsteady hand holding the camera belonged to Bill Bernstein of San Francisco, one of the American crew members who volunteered to man the refugee vessel and who at times passed his 8 mm home movie camera to a shipmate so he could mug before his own lens.

The images are made more poignant by the fact that the amateur photographer was unknowingly preparing his own memorial. Shortly after the film was shot, British Navy members, under orders to enforce a strict limit on Jewish immigration into Palestine, boarded the Exodus to thwart a planned landing at Haifa. A scuffle broke out in which Bernstein and two refugees were killed and dozens of other passengers injured.

Unlike the Hollywood version, the real-life incident culminated in the forceful return of the refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, to Germany; it took another two years and the birth of Israel for the intended pilgrims to reach the Holy Land.

The Bernstein film was used in “Ahead of Time,” a new documentary about U.S. photojournalist Ruth Gruber, whose firsthand coverage of the Exodus journey helped bring the story to international prominence. The original exposure exerted pressure on Britain to cede its mandate in the area to the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine, which resolved the issue of Israeli statehood in 1948. Bernstein’s footage survives because the sailor’s descendants entrusted it to the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis.

The Genesis

Wedged in a classroom-sized basement space below the Lown School of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, at the pinnacle of campus, the film center is the brainchild of founding director Sharon Pucker Rivo ’61. After earning a master’s in international relations and political science at the University of California at Berkeley, Rivo returned to Boston in 1963 and became one of the first women producers at WGBH-TV. In 1973 she was hired by the late Leon Jick, a Brandeis professor of American Jewish history, at the Institute for Jewish Life, a national research project. There she was put in charge of assessing the state of Jewish media, with a particular emphasis on TV and cinema.

She had not delved far into her research — she calls it a “daily treasure hunt” — when a discovery set the course for her life. Following a lead from a friend, she learned that the family of famed filmmaker Joseph Seiden still possessed fragments of 30 motion pictures Seiden and others had created in the Yiddish language.

“I literally stumbled upon this collection that I knew I had to save; that accident became the genesis of what is now the National Center for Jewish Film,” says Rivo.

Initially there was little interest in these rare materials. Yiddish cinema as a genre didn’t exist until aggregated by Rivo. She understood the importance of collecting and protecting the remnants of movies produced in a dying tongue — not just as a form of entertainment, but also as a rare glimpse into a culture that had not been widely documented. While Jewish presence in the Hollywood film industry is legendary, the relics the Seiden family proffered had been produced primarily in New York and Warsaw for Yiddish-speaking audiences. In the words of prominent movie critic J. Hoberman, these films “addressed the dislocations between the Old Country and the New World, parent and child, film community and industrial society, worker and allrightnik, that existed within each member of the audience.”

What’s more, they captured the heyday of the Yiddish stage, which had its own classic literature, its own matinee idols and even its own geography: In the early 1900s, New York’s Second Avenue, aglitter with marquees, was known as “the Yiddish Broadway.” By the time of Rivo’s treasure hunt, though, Yiddish theater was a culture as dead as Pompeii. In addition, the films that were created overseas during the early 20th century shed light on pre-Holocaust Europe, documenting the lifestyle, dress, social interactions and artifacts of what Rivo calls “communities destroyed before their time.”

Enthralled with her find and convinced the Yiddish films were cultural artifacts worth preserving, Rivo worked up an optimistic estimate of $250,000 to save 10  pictures. The process would involve transferring the vintage images from their fragile nitrate film to sturdier acetate safety stock in 16 mm or 35 mm, as well as creating new translations into English for accurate, easily read subtitles.

But when she started visiting national Jewish organizations to secure funding for the project, she says, people asked, “You want to spend a quarter of a million dollars to save 10 old Yiddish films? Are you crazy?”

Crazy Like a Fox

Fortunately, not everyone accused her of lunacy. The National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute recognized the significance of the Yiddish films and provided a preservation grant of $41,000, opening the tap on a modest but steady stream of funding that continues today.

In 1976, Brandeis president Marver Bernstein and president emeritus Abram Sacher offered to provide a home for the film project in the Lown Judaic Center. The new endeavor became affiliated with the Near Eastern and Judaic studies department, which later offered Rivo a faculty position teaching Jewish film courses.

Over the next three decades, Rivo and a colleague, Miriam “Mimi” Krant, who died in 2006, managed to preserve 38 complete Yiddish feature movies as well as dozens of other “orphan” films — a feat no one else has even come close to — at a total cost of more than $4 million.