With the release of Bardejov, Rabbi Shmuel Lynn has come back to the screen

Photos: Avi Gass

Show business seems like no business for an Orthodox rabbi. But Rabbi Shmuel Lynn, director of Olami Manhattan, has been charting a path in film-making that is decidedly unorthodox for the entertainment world. With the release of Bardejov, his full-length feature film that shines a new light on a dark chapter of Jewish history, he hopes to inspire viewers to explore their own roots

Nestled in Slovakia’s mountains and dotted with picturesque medieval buildings, the town of Bardejov looks like something out of a fairy tale. In the years before the war, it was known as a vacation spot, frequented by chassidic rebbes and their entourages.

But then, in 1939, Slovakia allied with Germany, and three years later, when the Nazis decided to round up the Jews of Bardejov for deportation, the local Slovaks — the Hlinka Guard — were available to do the job for them. In what was the first organized transport to Auschwitz, the Slovaks were ordered to round up 300 Jewish girls to go work in a “shoe factory.” Raphael Lowey, a winemaker and the lay leader of the community, learned through his connections — fleeing Polish Jews and escapees from Treblinka who made their way to Bardejov — that the shoe factory jobs were nothing more than a ruse, a cover for extermination.

As some of the local Jews had access to gunpowder, Lowey proposed blowing up the entire town, which would create mass chaos as well as a diversion so that the girls, and others who would surely be next, could escape their imminent death. But the town’s rabbi, a great-grandson of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz (most of the town were Sanzer chassidim), ruled that it was forbidden (it was a complex sh’eilah amid so many other complex queries that arose in the context of the war). Their next plan was risky but workable: Before the transport would take the girls away, they could feign a typhus epidemic. The Jewish leaders procured serum from the larger city of Kosice and smuggled it to the girls, who were being held in the local girls’ school.

Not every girl took the serum, but some were given double doses. Everyone feared the symptoms might not appear in time — the local leaders even bribed a doctor to declare an epidemic if no symptoms developed rapidly. But the girls became violently ill while waiting to board their transports, the authorities panicked, and the girls were returned to the town on Erev Pesach, and all of them managed to recover, gaining a temporary reprieve on their lives.

This gripping story of the staged epidemic of 1942 was largely unknown — until now. Rabbi Shmuel Lynn, director of the kiruv organization Olami Manhattan and a former screenwriter for film and television, created a film to tell the story. Bardejov, written by Rabbi Lynn and released last month, is a full-length feature film based on the heroic story of that little Slovakian town. The film premiered recently in Los Angeles and has been picked up by the major domestic and international distributors.