Let My People Go: The Story of Israel | |
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Directed by | Marshall Flaum |
Written by | Marshall Flaum |
Produced by | Marshall Flaum Janet Voelker |
Narrated by | Richard Basehart |
Edited by | Nicholas Clapp |
Production company | |
Distributed by | Xerox |
Release date |
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Running time | 60 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Let My People Go: The Story of Israel is a 1965 American documentary film directed by Marshall Flaum. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1965. [1] Flaum also produced and wrote the documentary. [2]
With narration by Richard Basehart and an original score by Israeli composer Marc Lavry, Let My People Go depicts the story of the efforts to create a homeland for the Jewish people, interweaving archival footage of such individuals and events reaching back to Theodor Herzl in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The film shows World Zionist Organization president Chaim Weizmann meeting with Arthur Balfour, who authored the Balfour Declaration, which stated that "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". [3]
The documentary showed Jewish refugees on ships barred from entry into the Mandate Palestine following the White Paper of 1939 that restricted Jewish immigration and included film taken during the Holocaust that had not previously been seen depicting Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto and a young woman carrying her unmoving child, as well as the "illegals", displaced persons who had attempted to evade the British blockade after World War II who were detained in British DP camps in Cyprus. After showing people listening to a shortwave broadcast of the proceedings in 1947 at the United Nations approving the partition plan that led to the creation of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948, the film ends with men and women planting trees in memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust. [4]
The film was broadcast in the United States in April 1965 on a nationwide network of independent stations, with the sponsorship of the Xerox Corporation. [4]
Let My People Go was described by critic Donald Kirkley of The Baltimore Sun as being "one of those rare programs which remind us of the heights to which television can soar when it is at its best." [5] Television critic Jack Gould of The New York Times called the film "A documentary of remorseless realism... that seared the viewer's consciousness with the tireless nobility and animal barbarity of the human race". [4]
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.
Zionism is an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside of Europe. It eventually focused on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became the ideology supporting the protection and development of Israel as a Jewish state, in particular, a state with a Jewish demographic majority, and has been described as Israel's national or state ideology.
Chaim Azriel Weizmann 27 November 1874 – 9 November 1952) was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as president of the Zionist Organization and later as the first president of Israel. He was elected on 16 February 1949, and served until his death in 1952. Weizmann was instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and convincing the United States government to recognize the newly formed State of Israel in 1948.
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