Jon
Avnet and Shannon Murphy
honored as Holocaust educators. |
GHETTO FIGHTERS MUSEUM
Honor Filmmaker and Teacher
For Holocaust Discourse
Story and Photo by Tim Boxer
 HO
will be making the first film about 9/11 or the suicide bombers
plaguing Israel? I posed the question to Hollywood producer/director
Jon Avnet, whose Holocaust movie, Uprising, about the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was an NBC miniseries last fall.
“I
don’t know yet how to do it,” Avnet said. “I don’t have any
organized thoughts how to deal with it.”
He said no filmmaker would approach the subject
at this time.
“The first films about Vietnam were shlock
and exploitive,” he said. “Apocalypse Now was the best
one. It will take a while to do it right on 9/11 and the suicide
bombers.”
The American Friends of the Ghetto Fighters
Museum honored Avnet at its second annual dinner at Chelsea Piers.
Founded in 1949 by survivors of the Jewish
resistance, the museum is located at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot just
north of Haifa.
Avnet said he made Uprising because he
was irked that the true story of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw
Ghetto had never been properly told.
“I made the film to keep the people who died
alive for coming generations.”
He could have told the story as a documentary
or as entertainment.
“I chose the way of entertainment,” he
said. “I come from a world where entertainment expresses the
deepest emotions.
“I wanted to reach a younger generation,
which is crucial.“
He admitted he was never a good student. His 10th
grade teacher, exasperated, told him, “You’ll either be a genius
or a madman.”
Today he calls himself “a meshugener from
Hollywood, although originally a meshugener from Brooklyn.”
“Teaching is what we all should do,” Avnet
said.
So the American Friends honored Avnet as an
educator. The group also honored Rabbi Dov Lerea of New
York’s Heschel School and the non-Jewish Shannon Murphy of
Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky.
Murphy, a geography teacher, first encountered
Holocaust education when she took part in a seminar two years ago at
the museum.
“The ceremony at the World Trade Center,”
she said, “serves as another reminder of the tragic events of the
Holocaust which we should never forget.”
|
