Luboml: My Heart Remembers

For centuries, the Jewish market town Luboml, one of the oldest in Eastern Europe, was filled with the comings and goings of a vibrant shtetl life. During the Holocaust, the shtetl was destroyed, its four thousand Jews murdered, many of them led to their death in a nearby killing field one week in October,1942. Only 51 survived. The town, as it once was, vanished. Not one Jew lives there today.

Luboml:My Heart Remembers chronicles the simple joys of the shtetl. Rather than concentrate on the horrors of the Holocaust, in which five thousand shtetls and their way of life was destroyed, the film celebrates everyday life through rare photographs, interviews with the fortunate few who escaped to refuge in America, and a return trip to Luboml by two men, Aaron Ziegelman and Abe Getman, now old, who remember their childhoods.

Luboml’s streets, her shops, marketplace and tradespeople come back to life. The Jewish men and women who once lived there, their faces marked with age, recall the thrill of market day, the excitement of a wedding, the baking in their mother’s kitchen. We glimpse the Jewish townspeople in their homes and synagogue, at work and prayer, at the seder, on the Sabbath, going to the movies, to school, posing at the local photographer.

The documentary honors both Luboml’s Jews, and the now lost shtetl way of life ...by remembering those who died, not as victims, but as people.

To produce this documentary, Douglas and Steinman traveled to the Ukraine.

This documentary is available as VHS and DVD from Cinema Guild.

Ron Steinman directing on location in Luboml, the Ukraine.