Join us for a film screening and discussion with the producer of "Geto: The Historic Ghetto of Venice," Michael Philip Davis, as we commemorate Yom Hashoah at Mount Sinai Jewish Center.

The film re-creates the Jews’ unique walled-in existence, beginning with their exile to the Ghetto in 1515. The film spans the Ghetto’s entire history, including its darkest chapter, the Fascist period, which comes to life in rare footage of Hitler and Mussolini’s first meeting in Venice in 1934. The Venetian Jews ultimately met the same fate as much of European Jewry under Hitler and Mussolini.

In 1980 the Lithuanian-born painter and sculptor Arbit Blatas created seven bronze bas-reliefs, entitled The Monument of the Holocaust, to memorialize the Venetian Jews who died in World War II. With the monument as its inspiration, Geto becomes the first film about this storied corner of Venice that first sequestered the Jews and gave the word “ghetto” to the world.

A discussion with co-producer Michael Philip Davis will follow the screening.