Kino Lorber has set a June 21 release date for Kaddish, a documentary by Steve Brand about a young Jew coming to terms with his father’s traumatic history.
The 1984 documentary will be released on DVD only under the Kino Classics banner.
Kaddish is the story of the stormy yet loving relationship between writer and Jewish activist Yossi Klein and his father Zoltan, who had survived the Holocaust’s devastation of Hungarian Jewry by hiding in a hole in the ground for six months while his parents — Yossi’s grandparents — died at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Once Yossi and his sister, Karen, were born, Zoltan was determined that they be emotionally prepared to survive another holocaust. His story of hiding in the forest and the murder of his parents became his children’s bedtime stories. Their mother, Breindy, compensated by reading Dr. Seuss books.
Kaddish culminates at the first International Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem, which Yossi attends “wearing two yarmulkes” — as a writer and as the child of a survivor. But he attends alone, and, he soon realizes, bereft.
Bonus features on the two-disc set include trailers, the original pilot, deleted scenes, reviews, awards, screening history highlights, bios, and new interviews with both Brand and Klein.