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In 1950, the great actor, producer and Yiddish theater impresario Maurice Schwartz closed down his Yiddish Art Theater in New York. Demand for Yiddish theater had waned. That same year, what were believed to be the last Yiddish language feature movies to be made were released. They were Josef Berne’s “Catskill Honeymoon” and Joseph Seiden’s “Monticello, Here We Come!” While Yiddish theater would haltingly continue, Yiddish cinema seemed over. In the late 1970s and early 80s, three film students Josh Waletzky, Sally Heckel and David Greenwald, put Yiddish language in their short films in effort to resuscitate a once vibrant film genre in Poland, the U.S.S.R. and the United States, beginning an effort that continues today with creation of numerous Yiddish shorts along with cooking, fitness and music videos, many posted on YouTube. Then just over 30 years after the presumed demise of Yiddish cinema, a feature narrative was produced by an unconventional Belgian fil ....
It’s been a long time coming a horror film set in a Hasidic section of Brooklyn, where much of the dialogue is in Yiddish. Films that deal with the supernatural are certainly no stranger to Jewish lore and culture. Since the advent of cinema, there have been several films made about dybbuks, demons and golems, movies produced in Europe, Israel and the United States, movies in Hebrew, Polish, French, English, and now once again in Yiddish. In his debut feature film “The Vigil,” film director Keith Thomas trains his camera lens on the Boro Park section of Brooklyn, where an OTD Jew (or “off the derech” a term that refers to a Jew who has left the Hasidic world), is in search of a different life. ....