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By Susan R. Eisenstein | May 20, 2021
Yisroel ‘Randy’ Settenbrino, Brooklyn-born, Clifton resident, and developer of the Blue Moon Hotel in New York City, is on a very important mission. He is campaigning to save the hotel. First opened in 2006, the Blue Moon Hotel is located on 100 Orchard Street, the Bicentennial Block, across the street from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The Blue Moon Hotel is the second oldest building after the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street. It is housed in an historic, beautifully restored eight-story brick tenement building Settenbrino added three of the floors that was built in 1879. The hotel gives guests the feeling of the 19th century and the neighborhood’s Jewish history as home to working-class immigrants.
Originally divided by an interval, the second act brings only tragedy for Tevye, who faces the loss of his home to tsarist persecution and his two daughters to a new world. Indeed, it is Hodel’s farewell to “Far from the Home I Love” that moved Topol most. “She doesn’t speak, she just sings the song, and he understands every single feeling that she has. And he knows he won’t see her anymore.”
As the film’s emotional fulcrum, Topol’s portrayal of the pious milkman
has led people to ask about his real persona. “He doesn’t act, but lives the part and you can actually see his heart breaking,” says his youngest daughter, Adi, who played Chava with him at the Palladium in 1994.
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It is known as the Holocaust. Jews call it the “
Shoah” – an ancient word for disaster” or “catastrophe. The mass, industrialized murder of European Jewry, the culmination of centuries of hate in an explosion of unimaginable brutality, left nearly six million Jews dead. Not killed in battle or even casualties of war but put to death, often in factories built expressly for murder.
Since the gruesome discoveries of just how Nazi Germany set about eradicating Europe s Jews, aided and abetted by anti-Semitic or just cowed populations, mankind has struggled to understand what happened. And to answer the ultimate question – could it happen again? The subject is exhaustively covered in media, literature – and cinema, too, where some set out to document, some to investigate and some even, finally, to riff. Directors wonder, dabble in alternate realities and ask: What if? And then what if?
hen the film adaptation of
Fiddler on the Roof opened, revered critic Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and said director Norman Jewison “has made as good a film as can be made from the material”. Ebert, now deceased, thought the storyline was “quite simply boring”, which decried the work of its original author, Sholem Aleichem, and raised doubts about Ebert’s Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
With global acclaim from all other reviewers, three Oscars, multiple nominations (including Best Actor for Chaim Topol) and a cumulative $83.3 million at the box office, the enduring appeal of this movie is irrefutable.