Jewish film days bring screenings to St Pölten and Baden
Thursday 5th November 2026 on 15:01 in
Austria
Cinema Paradiso will host Jewish film screenings and live events in St Pölten and Baden in November, including discussions with 97-year-old Auschwitz survivor Erich Finsches, ORF reported.
The film days run in St Pölten from November 4 to December 8 and in Baden from November 8 to 29. Organisers said the programme aims to oppose antisemitism and exclusion and remember the November pogroms of 1938 and the Shoah.
A central event is a screening of the documentary “Leben und Überleben” in Baden on November 18 and St Pölten on November 19. Each screening will be followed by a discussion with Finsches and director Matthias Jaklitsch. Director Alexander Melach is also expected to attend. His father was imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp, and organisers said he would bring the perspective of later generations.
Jaklitsch followed Finsches for more than six years at commemorative events, school visits and on trips together. The film looks at Finsches’s youth during Nazi persecution and his difficult new beginning after the Second World War.
Both cinemas will screen Melach’s “Flow My Tears” on November 26, marking its premiere in Lower Austria. In St Pölten, a guided tour of the New Jewish Cemetery on November 15 will explore the city’s Jewish history, burial customs and the lives of individual community members.
Other films include “A Letter to David”, about actor David Cunio, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz in 2023; Claude Lanzmann’s “Sobibór, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures”, about the uprising at the Nazi extermination camp; and “Abschied ein Leben lang – Käthe Kratz”, about the expulsion of Jewish residents from Vienna’s Josefstadt district.
The programme also features “From Darkness to Light”, about Jerry Lewis’s unfinished film on the Holocaust; Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy “To Be or Not to Be”, about resistance to the Nazis; “Coexistence, My Ass!”, about Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi; “Sabbath Queen”, about a queer rabbi; “Rabbi Capoeira”, about the meeting of Jewish tradition and Brazilian martial arts; and the short film “The Cave Synagogue”.