Bar Mitzvah is believed to be his only film performance.Īn American-made feature film about Jewish Poland (and the "Old Country" more generally), Bar Mitzvah shows how American and Polish Jews caricaturized each other during this period as it represents the pinnacle of low budget movie making. Thomashefsky was 67 years old when he starred in Bar Mitzvah he died four years later. Produced in New York in 1935, the film was written and directed by Henry Lynn based on a play of the same name written by Boris Thomashefsky. It had a reasonable theatrical run in the US and remained in distribution for several years. 30,000 people lined the streets of the Lower East Side on the occasion of his funeral in 1939.īar Mitzvah opened on March 15, 1935, at the Clinton Theater on the Lower East Side.
Enormously popular, with a flamboyant personality and a famously tumultuous personal life, Thomashefsky was the superstar of Yiddish theater. Boris and his wife, Yiddish actress Bessie Thomashefsky, built a 2nd Avenue theater in 1912, published their own magazine and encouraged new generations of young artists. Highlights include the hit song �Erlekh Zayn� (�Be Virtuous�) sung by Thomashefsky and an entertaining song-and-dance number by Sam Colton as the young American suitor.Īn actor, singer and producer, Boris Thomashefsky (1868-1939) was a pioneer of the American Yiddish Theater and one its central figures for nearly fifty years. The drama is punctuated with numerous songs typical of the vaudeville stage and the Lower East Side Yiddish theater. In the end, the con artists are arrested and the family is reunited. All is set right, however, when Israel is saved by his daughter�s happy-go-lucky American suitor. Israel discovers Rosalie�s treacheries and her lover pulls a gun. She secretly attends Yudele�s bar mitzvah ceremony before leaving, but is revealed by her sobbing when Yudele chants the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for his �dead� mother. She discovers from her in-laws that Israel has remarried and determines not to cause her family any more pain (�I can�t live anymore, I�m going back to the ocean�). Leah (Regina Zuckerberg) survived the shipwreck and has recently regained her memory. Israel has remarried Rosalie (Anita Chayes), a schemer planning to rob him and run off with her lover. Israel (Boris Thomashefsky), a Polish widower whose wife Leah was lost at sea ten years earlier, is preparing his son Yudele for his bar mitzvah. Starring Yiddish theater superstar Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance, this musical melodrama is a masterwork of shund, the bread and butter of the Yiddish theater. Shock, tears and laughs abound when his beloved wife returns on the eve of her son's bar mitzvah after a ten-year absence. "If Jewish film, and Jewish culture at large, are about legacy, then this is required viewing, an immersion in remembrance of the forefathers"īelieving his wife lost at sea, Israel remarries a scheming gold-digger.
".pays tribute to religious and theatrical traditions while surprisingly bursting their bonds in moments of cinematic inspiration.lightning bolts of cinematic revelation suggest the pliable, accessible modernism of the cinema." Special thanks to David Grubin Productions. Public exhibition screenings will be preceded by an 8-minute video introduction to Boris Thomashefsky & the Yiddish theater excerpted from the 2008 documentary film The Jewish Americans, courtesy of WETA, Washington, D.C.
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