Wilfrid Israel, who helped tens of thousands of Jews escape persecution (Photo courtesy "The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel"/Highlight Productions)
Somewhere in Kibbutz HaZore'a, a settlement in northern Israel, stands the Wilfrid Israel Museum. As a child, Yonatan Nir remembers often playing on the lawn in front of the building, which he knew as the “Wilfrid House.” But in the two decades he spent living in the kibbutz, Nir never found out who exactly “Wilfrid” was.
“We'd all play in the same building, same area, the same lawn in front of it, but nobody knew who this man was,” says Nir, an Israeli film director and former photojournalist.
But in 2012, a friend persuaded Nir to make a film about a book the friend had been reading called “Wilfrid Israel: German Jewry's Secret Ambassador,” by historian Naomi Shepherd. The back of the book featured a quote from Albert Einstein: “Never in my life have I come in contact with a being so noble, so strong and as selfless as Wilfrid Israel.”
Israeli filmmaker Yonatan Nir researched the life of Wilfrid Israel. (Photo courtesy "The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel"/Highlight Productions)
This revived Nir’s interest and set him on the path to create his latest documentary, “The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel,” which screens on Jan. 10 as part of the Weinstein JCC’s 2019 Israeli Film Festival. Nir’s previous work includes the documentaries “Dolphin Boy” and the award-winning “My Hero Brother.”
Wilfrid Israel was a wealthy Jewish Anglo-German businessman responsible for saving and helping emigrate tens of thousands of Jewish people before and during the rule of Nazi Germany. He also played an integral role in the Kindertransport, an operation rescuing about 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Germany and other countries and bringing them to the U.K. The founders of Kibbutz HaZore'a were some of the people Israel helped free, and they kept in contact with him until his death in 1943, when his flight was shot down by German fighter planes.
The film revolves around Nir’s personal quest to find out who Israel was and why his story, which seems so significant in Jewish history, was relatively untold. Curious, he says he “had no choice” but to make the documentary. “How come we didn't know about it in the kibbutz, and how come we didn't know about it in Israel?” Nir says. “How come he did not become a hero in our country?”
Work on the documentary began in 2012 and took Nir from Israel to Germany, England and the U.S. The film was released in 2016.
Israel’s family had been well-connected to England’s Jewish community and had owned one of the largest department stores in Berlin. Nir explains that the store had been registered and insured in Britain, which kept it from Nazi confiscation, unlike other Jewish businesses, until 1939.
He used that advantage to negotiate with the Nazis to free Jews from arrest and concentration camps for years, a morally ambiguous move Nir thought played a role in why Israel was so rarely discussed by those who knew of him, for fear of calling into question his good deeds.
“In order to rescue people from Germany in the '30s, you couldn't fight the Nazis,” Nir says. “You had to speak with them, negotiate with them, bribe them. You had to find how your own interests are working together with their interests. ... Now, in my country, Israel, anyone who communicated with Nazis was regarded almost like a traitor, like the one who was doing business with the devil. And Wilfrid Israel did business with the devil.”
Other reasons for Israel’s relative anonymity included his secretive personality, destroyed documents and his lack of a wife or children to keep his memory alive, Nir says. Israel himself had not wanted his actions discussed, either.
“In a couple of letters that I discovered, he asked people to never tell his story,” Nir says. “He said, ‘Whatever we've been through here in the past few years, we'll have to carry as a burden in our hearts for the rest of our lives.’ ”
Contrary to Israel’s wish, Nir decided to share his story, but tried to do so with respect and a gentle touch. “It was a question that I asked myself many times,” Nir says, “He was a pacifist. He always wanted to help the weak. He didn't care about where you're from and your ethnicity. He wanted to help people. … And I think in the eye of what is happening today in the world, it is important that this kind of role model will be known to younger generations. So I think if I were to ask him, he wouldn't mind."
"The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel" screens on Jan. 10 at 7 p.m. at the Weinstein JCC. Tickets for the Israeli Film Festival 2019 are $7 to $10 per film, with passes available.
