‘Shttl’ is a Holocaust movie that approaches subject from a different angle than most

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Moshe Lobel, right, with Antoine Millet in “Shttl.”

A village market bustles with merchants and music as people haggle, laugh, argue and dream. The day is like any other — until it isn’t.

This summer will mark 85 years since Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. The film “Shttl,” now playing in Teaneck and New York, is set on the eve of that invasion in June 1941, in a fictional Jewish village in Soviet Ukraine across the river from Nazi-controlled Eastern Poland.

Within a day, everything changes.

Many people are killed, with masses of soldiers pouring in to snuff out lives. But the movie is not fixated on obliteration and death. Instead, the Nazi menace is allowed to slide almost out of view. Because on this day, Mendele, an aspiring filmmaker, makes his return. He had left the shtetl to join the Red Army and chase his movie dreams in Kyiv. Now he is back with his friend, on a mission to reunite with his young love before she marries someone else. In doing so, he must confront the home he left behind.

“Shttl” — shtetl is Yiddish for “village” — is a Holocaust movie that “chooses to focus on what was lost, not just the loss itself,” says New Jersey actor Moshe Lobel.

He stars as Mendele in the film, which premiered in Europe in 2022 and is currently playing locally before and after Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah (April 14).

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Moshe Lobel and Petro Ninovskyi in “Shttl.”

Mendele’s journey through his village is mostly presented as one continuous shot, a last gasp of a world that would disappear. It is also a dance through memory. Each door in each scene — at a house, a cemetery, a synagogue — opens into another part of Mendele’s life, and the life of the shtetl. This black-and-white movie turns color in Mendele’s flashbacks. The camera winds through the village with him, lingering on the faces of people as he walks by. Each one could be their own story.

Much has happened in the world since Lobel filmed “Shttl” 37 miles outside Kyiv with director Ady Walter. Six months after they wrapped the French-Ukrainian production, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Plans to turn the set into a museum were thwarted when Russian forces took over the area and it became a minefield — an eerie meeting of histories in a land that knows much about war.

Scenes of death and chaos have continued to loop on phone screens daily, from Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Sudan, Iran and Lebanon.

“I think what we do need more than ever is humanization,” says Lobel, who will participate in a Q&A session following a “Shttl” screening at Teaneck Cinemas on April 12.

“Every government, every group, has a reason to dehumanize the other, and we see in every part of our politics and media how they choose to show certain people as real, relatable human beings, and others as kind of this abstract collateral damage. My hope is that people see this and realize that it’s not about looking at who are the heroes and who are the villains, who are the victims and who are the perpetrators, but just to see people as people that we can relate to.

“It’s not just Jewish people who relate to our film. I get feedback from people from other cultures and faiths who connect with their own parallels to the very specific things that my character is dealing with, or the other characters. So I hope there should be more of that at this time: of just seeing each other, connecting with the humanity.”

Lobel identifies with his “Shttl” character, who decides to leave his home to pursue a dream that can’t be contained by the village. When Mendele returns, his father wants him to forget Kyiv and stay in the shtetl, where he can recommit himself to tradition and Torah study.

Lobel calls the film, which is told in Yiddish and Ukrainian, a story of “exodus and return.” The actor, a native Yiddish speaker, was born in Long Branch and grew up in the Satmar Hasidic community in Lakewood before moving to Brooklyn. He began to leave the Satmar community when he was 12.

“I made a huge choice at that time to refuse to go back to my school and try to open up a little bit,” Lobel says. “My father had wanted me to go back and ultimately disowned me.”

He transitioned to using English as his main language and began watching films and TV, eventually fostering a passion for performing. Lobel debuted off-Broadway in the Clifford Odets play “Awake and Sing!” at New York’s New Yiddish Rep in 2017.

“I played a budding young Communist in The Bronx in the ’30s, which I guess is my type,” he says, referring to his “Shttl” character. He worked with Macha Fogel, a French Yiddishist who later recommended him for the role of Mendele. Walter had extensive conversations with Lobel about the part, but they didn’t meet in person until filming in Ukraine.

Besides the idea of leaving home and community, Lobel related to Mendele’s penchant for listening to people on the margins. In the film, his character talks to and plays chess with Menachem, the town meshugana, or crazy person. “I am the person who’s always talking to people on the subway who most people would prefer to avoid,” Lobel says.

Walter, who wrote “Shttl” in addition to directing it, grew up in Luxembourg. Now based in Paris, he treasures memories of New Jersey in the ’90s, when he visited Montclair for an extended period of time as a teen. “I had probably the best summer of my life there,” he says, during a break from work on another set.

He says he wanted to make “Shttl” because he was annoyed with how the Shoah, or Holocaust, was usually depicted in movies. “We always see in films the story of the destruction itself, or the deaths,” he says. “What I really wanted to do was portray life prior to destruction … When you live, you have arguments, debates, you have discussions … I really wanted to show the very last hours of vivid life. This was really important to me, to capture the essence of it.”

He says the film is his way of giving “some sense of justice” to the six million Jews killed. “Each person who died was (their) own world, and that’s a catastrophe each time — it’s six million times a catastrophe,” he says.

Lively debate among the residents of the shtetl happens in an environment where certain dangers were not completely dismissed, but also not yet completely real. “There are questions you can’t ask yourself anymore once the death machine is on its way,” Walter says.

Filming a story about one invasion, Walter and his cast and Ukrainian crew had to contend with the looming threat of another invasion.

“In April 2021, as we were preparing to film, Putin surrounded Ukraine with 100,000 troops, and we thought we wouldn’t be able to make the film at that point,” Lobel says. They had to postpone production because they couldn’t insure the film.

“We were waiting for a possible imminent invasion already that summer, that spring,” Lobel says. “But what’s extraordinary now, thinking about what was I thinking in April of 2021 as troops were lined up on the border of Ukraine … I was thinking about my work. I was thinking about the film, that I really need this film to happen. I was not thinking about the reality of war, and I would say even the people in Kyiv, my colleagues, my friends, up to February of 2022, even as the whole world was seeing what was about to happen — every intelligence agency in the world was saying Russia is about to invade the country and Kyiv — the people just went to work, just tried to live their lives and couldn’t really connect with that reality that was coming towards them. That’s really interesting because that is what we’re seeing in the film as well.”

Production eventually went ahead in the summer of 2021, with Russian tank units incorporated into the sets.

“We had a very tiny window, basically, between COVID and the war on Ukraine,” Walter says. “That’s really a miracle that we could shoot the film … Everybody knew that’s going to be the last summer of peace.”

The real-life timeline made filming the German invasion of 1941 feel all the more resonant. Recent photos sent to Walter show the place impassable, because it is now filled with mines. “That’s crazy, when you see the end of the film, knowing that a real army invading Ukraine invaded that set,” he says.

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From left, Petro Ninovskyi, Anisia Stasevich and Mosha Lobel in “Shttl.”

Watching scenes of the Russian invasion from New York in early 2022, Lobel saw a missile attack on a pedestrian bridge he had crossed a few months prior. “A lot of my castmates and crewmates are still there, and some of them are on the front lines, and others are just dealing with the effects of war pretty much every night,” says the actor, who returned to Ukraine in 2023 to screen the film. He keeps in touch with his co-star Anisia Stasevich, who plays Yuna, Mendele’s love and the daughter of the film’s rebbe.

The omitted letter in the film’s title is an homage to the 1969 novel “La Disparition” (“The Disappearance,” also known as “A Void”) by French writer Georges Perec, who lost his mother to Auschwitz. He doesn’t use the letter at all in the text, to represent absence.

“The Holocaust was omnipresent in my childhood,” Lobel says. “It was always spoken about. I remember when I was a very young child, much too young, some classmates were passing around a little book that had just horrifying photos of The Holocaust. So I was exposed to that pretty early, and my great-grandmother, a survivor … all I could really remember from her was she was the only survivor of 18 siblings, and she was in Auschwitz, grew up in a town that’s now Ukraine … She had had dementia … she was just reliving The Holocaust every day. Every time I saw her, she was in her own world. Our teachers, our rebbe, many of them were Holocaust survivors or connected, so it really was everywhere. But one thing we didn’t have was a real view into what their lives were like before.”

Regardless, The Holocaust had a sizable influence on the values of the postwar Satmar community. “There was this nostalgia of this world that we were trying to preserve with our lifestyle,” Lobel says. “It wasn’t until later that I started to understand that the world that they grew up in was much more complicated. It’s been really interesting and a real privilege to get to explore what their world would’ve been like, not as mythical beings, but as real people.”

Walter’s approach to telling a Holocaust narrative — of people living life on the precipice of death — recalls the 2022 documentary “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.” That film examines 1938 footage of the Polish town of Nasielsk before its Jewish community was deported to ghettos and then Treblinka.

“There’s also the element of The Holocaust by bullets, which is almost never talked about,” Lobel says. “We often focus on stories of concentration camps or ghettos or war, but we don’t know as much and we don’t talk as much about the millions who were unceremoniously shot from one day to the next, often locally near their homes, and those people basically disappeared. We do hear stories of survival a lot, and we focus on that. But what about all those people who disappeared? They still had full lives, full stories. They had hopes and dreams, and even inner conflict, and we just don’t know them. We don’t know anything about them because they’re not here to tell the story. So that’s what we’re trying to do.”

The setup of “Shttl” primes the audience for a love story between Mendele and Yuna, but it ends up being something more: a debate on tradition and survival.

“We really wanted to delve into the complexities of what it means to be a person who is in the real world, caught up between different ideologies and different movements and identities,” Lobel says.

The movie, made with support from the Ukrainian State Film Agency, takes place almost two years after The Soviet Union’s Red Army has taken control of the village. An image of Stalin is posted in the shtetl, where Soviets give speeches. A standoff between the traditions of the religious Hasidic community — represented by characters like Yuna’s intended husband Folie (Antoine Millet) — and Soviet dominance is just one conflict that has locals publicly arguing. Turning down work for the Russians in favor of religious study can prove a dangerous and financially ruinous decision (that forces women to shoulder the burden).

“It’s not a debate of ideas,” Lobel says. “It’s not people kind of sitting around in a university debating something foreign to them. The stakes are real and immediate. So when I see the whole shtetl arguing amongst themselves, I see everyone just trying to figure out how to survive.”

The actor was previously part of a much different shtetl story — a 2018 production of “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish,” directed by Joel Grey.

“I don’t think that ever existed: this unified chorus of tradition,” Lobel says of the 1905-set musical. “Less, so, I would say, in 1941, at this tumultuous time of political and religious and secular movements that were clashing.”

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Saul Rubinek in “Shttl.”

Mendele, a junior sergeant in the Red Army who grew up studying Torah, finds himself torn between worlds. He tells the rebbe, played by veteran actor Saul Rubinek, that he believes films can be sacred in their own right and depict questions of morality, like the stories from the Torah. Rubinek (“True Romance,” “Unforgiven,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), 77, has his own connection to The Holocaust through his parents. The Canadian actor was born in a refugee camp in Germany. “Shttl” was the first time he acted in Yiddish, his first language, though his father performed in Yiddish theater before the Nazi invasion.

Language is fluid in the film, reflecting the overlapping reality of national and cultural identities. The production hired Yiddish speakers from Paris to create conversations that mixed with Ukrainian in the village market.

“It was kind of fun for me as an actor to have this tool to pivot around the different parts of his identity, language being a major part of that,” Lobel says of Mendele, whose good friend Demyan (“Ponies” actor Petro Ninovskyi) is Ukrainian, but not Jewish. “So sometimes you’ll see in the same scene, or even in the same line, he’ll say half of it in Yiddish and half of it in Ukrainian. And Ady gave us the autonomy to decide which lines we would say in Ukrainian.”

World events have shaped the reception to “Shttl” over the past few years, with charged conversations surrounding Jewish identity, Israel’s decimation of Gaza and Palestinians and the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.

“Just a few days ago, I was in Philadelphia for a screening, and a young woman came up to me afterwards,” Lobel says. “She spoke at length, she took a lot of notes … She connected with the film in so many ways as someone who grew up Catholic, and then she mentioned that she wanted to invite some of her friends to see the film, but they said they weren’t sure if they should be supporting a Jewish film right now.

“I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t know, am I supposed to defend myself? Am I supposed to say, ‘No, no, don’t worry, it’s not what you think it is, it’s not propaganda’? You want to be able to just exist and not have to defend yourself and your identity. But then I was thinking a lot about what it means to be a Jewish artist and what antisemitism is … I would say, as an artist, it’s my job to be a reflection of humanity. I want to be able to stand up there as a Jewish person, as a Jewish artist, as a Jewish character, and for people to be able to see themselves in it no matter where they come from. And that means seeing themselves not only as a hero, but as a human being in all of its complexity. So both what we love and what we don’t like about ourselves is what we hope to be able to see onstage and in film, and process through that.

“Rather than hiding and retreating from Jewish storytelling, I feel more and more compelled to participate in it — not because I want to distinguish myself from the people at large, but to the contrary. It’s because I want to connect myself to the world.”

“Shttl” is playing at Teaneck Cinemas this week. Moshe Lobel will attend Q&As following screenings of the film in Teaneck (April 12) and at New Plaza Cinema in Manhattan (April 12 and 18). There will also be a screening with Q&A, April 14 at The Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.

For more on the film, visit menemshafilms.com/shttl. Here is the trailer:

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