On Monday evening, JCC Manhattan hosted a screening of the Oscar-nominated short film Joe’s Violin and a special panel including filmmaker Kahane Cooperman, producer Raphaela Neihausen and Holocaust survivor Joe Feingold, who is a primary subject of the film. Set to premiere on POV July 24, Joe’s Violin captures the history behind the violin Joe once traded for a pack of cigarettes in a camp for displaced persons, and documents the unlikely friendship he forges with 12-year-old Bronx girl Brianna Perez after he donates the violin to an instrument drive.
Isaac Kablocki, the senior director of JCC Manhattan film programs and of Israel Film Center, orchestrated the event and moderated the panel. Coinciding with Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the film screening, which took place in the Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Family Auditorium, was rendered particularly meaningful. As Joe noted during the post-film talk, the annual day of remembrance is held during the same time of year as Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which holds particular importance to the now 94-year old who was both born in Warsaw and recalls friends and relatives who partook in the uprising.
During the panel, Kahane explained that her idea for the film came from hearing about the instrument drive on her commute to work one morning on WQXR. “I was curious in this moment. Did this violin have a story?” Cooperman said. “And when I got to the next stoplight I wondered, is the student who gets this violin ever going to know what that story is? And at the next light I thought, what is that student’s story? And really by the time I pulled into the parking lot, the idea that two strangers in the city were going to be connected by this musical instrument, was just incredibly compelling.”
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