Two men are at odds over religion and love in Ady Walter’s Shttl
SHTTL (Ady Walter, 2022)
Temple Israel
112 East Seventy-Fifth St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Tuesday, June 2, free, 7:00
Series runs select Tuesday nights through August 11
tinyc.org
www.menemshafilms.com
On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a small Yiddish-speaking village on the Polish border teeters on the edge as the citizens debate war, collaboration, religion, women’s roles in society, and true love. In the tense, gripping Shttl, Ady Walter pulls off quite an impressive directorial debut, shooting the 110-minute film in one continuous take, shifting between black-and-white and color as the narrative unfolds: Mendele (Moshe Lobel) joins the military, promising to come back for Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), but while he is gone she is wooed/harassed by the mean-spirited Folie (Antoine Millet), whose father (Saul Rubinek) is the community’s spiritual leader. The strange spelling of the title is an homage to Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition (A Void), which never uses the fifth letter of the alphabet, its loss a symbol of profound absence. (Both of French novelist Perec’s parents were killed during the Holocaust, his father on the field of battle, his mother in Auschwitz.) The village, or shtetl, was built for the film and was going to be turned into a Jewish-Ukrainian museum until Russia invaded Ukraine.
Shttl is screening June 2 at 7:00 at Temple Israel on the Upper East Side, kicking off the synagogue’s free summer Reel Judaism festival, and will be followed by a Q&A with New Yiddish Rep veteran Lobel, moderated by Rabbi David Gelfand. The series continues select Tuesday nights through August 11 with such other films as Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s 2025 The Last Spy, Sandi DuBowski’s 2025 Sabbath Queen, and Daniel Am Rosenberg’s 2023 Less Than Kosher, all followed by discussions.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]