Directed by Robert Bedford, Joe Halio, and Stuart Fishelson
Produced by Robert Bedford, Joe Halio, and Stuart Fishelson
Two Documentary Shorts
USA | 1992-1993 | 60 min
In English
Two documentaries on the Jewish history of Salonika, Greece, featuring rare footage of Sephardic Shoah survivors.
Under Ottoman rule, Salonica dominated the commerce and culture of the Macedonian region. As the largest urban Jewish setting in Europe, Salonica was a haven for Spanish-Jews and the center of Torah and Kabbalah studies. During the Second World War, Nazi occupation of Greece destroyed the city of Salonica and 96% of the Jewish population in Greece. To this day, the Sephardim in the Holocaust are mostly overlooked.
Robert Bedford — Director & Producer
Robert Bedford is a self-employed media producer, and the executive vice president of the New York-based Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, whose mission is to preserve and promote “the complex and centuries-old culture of the Sephardic communities of Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, Europe, and the United States.”
Bedford is the producer of the foundation’s documentaries and exhibitions and editor of all the books it has published since the 1990s.
Joe Halio — Director & Producer
Joe Halio, M.D. was raised in a Sephardic family from Salonica and Turkey. He is the grandson of Albert J. Torres, publisher of the Spanish-Jewish newspaper La Vara, and the son of Hank Halio, author of Ladino Reveries. In addition to his practice of Geriatric Medicine, he serves as an officer of the North Shore Hospital Medical Staff Society, the North Shore Medical Staff Society IPA, and is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. He is the Medical Director of the Atlantic Beach Rescue. Joe has always been active in the in the Sephardic community of New York, first with Sephardic House, and the Broome and Allen Boys Association. He is President of the Sephardic Foundation on Aging, the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies & Culture, the Friendship & Truth Hesed V’Emet Society of Castorialis, and the Es AHaim Society. He is Secretary of the Sephardic Jewish Center of Forest Hills, and serves on the Board of Directors of the American Sephardi Federation, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, and the American Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece. Joe speaks and teaches Ladino. He has traveled to Salonica, Greece, Turkey and Israel many times.
Stuart Fishelson — Director & Producer
Stuart Fishelson is a photographer/filmmaker and professor of Media Arts at Long Island University, Brooklyn New York. He worked with photographers Arthur Leipzig and Arnold Newman, and his work has appeared in solo exhibitions throughout the US, Canada, and the Middle East. He was awarded grants from Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, NEH (National Education for the Humanities), Josephine Bay Foundation, John P. McGrath Fund, and TASA Award for scholarly achievement. His works Reflections of Einstein, Povereta Salonica, Will Rogers-an American Spirit, and Portrait of the Past have been shown on public television (PBS-New York, PBS-NOVA, and WGBH-Boston), Holocaust Museum in Washington-DC, and The Museum of Intolerance, Glen Cove, NY. His work also appeared in The Athens Film Festival in Greece, The Lower Eastside Film Festival in New York, IBM Think Theatre Research Center, and The Queens Science Museum in Queens-New York.