{"id":89799,"date":"2025-09-29T08:10:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T13:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=89799"},"modified":"2025-09-29T08:10:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T13:10:20","slug":"real-life-holocaust-survivors-star-in-scarlett-johanssons-directorial-debut-eleanor-the-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/real-life-holocaust-survivors-star-in-scarlett-johanssons-directorial-debut-eleanor-the-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Real-life Holocaust survivors star in Scarlett Johansson\u2019s directorial debut \u2018Eleanor the Great\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

By GRACE GILSON<\/p>\n

(JTA) \u2014 When Rita Zohar stepped into the role of Bessie Stern, a Holocaust survivor whose death sets in motion Scarlett Johansson\u2019s new film \u201cEleanor the Great,\u201d she wasn\u2019t simply acting.<\/p>\n

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June Squibb as Eleanor (R), and Rita Zohar as Bessie (L) in “Eleanor the Great.” (Anne Joyce\/Sony Pictures Classics)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Zohar, 81, is a childhood survivor of the Holocaust. She was also drawing on her lived experience of loss and resilience to bring life to her character.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis role in this movie has given me a voice,\u201d Zohar told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. \u201cEven though this is not my story, this is not what happened to me or my family, but still, by being able to verbalize it, I connected to Bessie, and I became Bessie in the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEleanor the Great,\u201d Johansson\u2019s directorial debut, stars 95-year-old Jewish actress June Squibb as she seeks connection in New York City following the death of her best friend Bessie. Feeling isolated, Squibb\u2019s character, Eleanor Morgenstein, winds up joining a support group for Holocaust survivors at the local Jewish community center.<\/p>\n

There, when pressed by the group\u2019s members to share her story, Morgenstein tells Bessie\u2019s story as her own, which Zohar orates in her own words.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt one point, they asked her, and they kind of pressure her to tell her story, and without any intention to lie, she starts telling the story as if it was hers,\u201d said Zohar. \u201cAnd then what happens in the movie is that she starts the first sentence, and then I appear and I tell the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

That choice, according to the script\u2019s author Tory Kamen, was intentional. In an interview with Hey Alma, Kamen said the character Bessie was named after her grandmother\u2019s best friend in Florida who is a Holocaust survivor.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother thing that was important to me was that we never really saw Eleanor telling Bessie\u2019s story. I wanted that to be from Bessie\u2019s mouth. That story should only be told by Bessie,\u201d Kamen said. \u201cAnd Rita Zohar, who plays Bessie, is a Holocaust survivor herself, and does an unbelievable job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morgenstein\u2019s story echoes others who have also falsely portrayed themselves as survivors. In 2016, a Pennsylvania man publicly apologized after giving speeches claiming to have survived Auschwitz, and in 2019, a German historian was outed for fabricating a family history of suffering in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Later on in the film, Morgenstein\u2019s story is picked up by a young journalism student played by Erin Kellyman, whose father\u2019s efforts to learn more about her story threatens to reveal her dishonesty.<\/p>\n

For Johansson, who broke down in tears on the PBS show \u201cFinding Your Roots\u201d in 2017 after learning her family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, the movie had a special resonance.<\/p>\n

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Scarlett Johansson on the set of “Eleanor the Great” with June Squibb. (Anne Joyce\/ Sony Pictures Classics)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cA lot of my family history was lost and it wasn\u2019t until many years later that I was actually able to connect with my family heritage,\u201d Johansson said in a red carpet interview at the Toronto Film Festival. \u201cI think because of that, this story really resonated with me. These survivors\u2019 stories are lost, there are organizations like Shoah that are committed to documenting them for future generations and their work is so important. I hope that this film really encourages people to ask questions of their relatives and to keep their stories alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johansson worked with the USC Shoah Foundation as well as Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue in Manhattan, to ensure real Holocaust survivors were featured in the film.<\/p>\n

That decision also led to the casting of Zohar, who was born in a concentration camp in Ukraine in 1944 where she was hidden during her infancy in a gap between two walls beneath a window.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the Russians came and liberated the camp, at that time, I was 4 and 1\/2 months old, and that probably saved my life, because I wouldn\u2019t have been able to survive longer than that,\u201d said Zohar.<\/p>\n

While the majority of her family was murdered, Zohar survived along with her mother and grandmother. After the war, Zohar\u2019s remaining family emigrated to Romania where they lived until she and her mother moved to Israel in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

\u201cArriving to Israel, it\u2019s as if you discovered the sun for the first time,\u201d said Zohar. \u201cIt was our sun, it was our country, and the whole country was at that time, so together, we were so high.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 14, Zohar began touring around the world with her mother acting in Israel\u2019s Yiddish theater before eventually starring in major movies, including \u201cAmadeus,\u201d in Hollywood in the 1980s. She later returned to Israel, where she starred in several critically acclaimed films including \u201cLaura Adler\u2019s Last Love Affair\u201d and \u201cMrs. Moskowitz and the Cats.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Zohar, while some critics of \u201cEleanor the Great\u201d have balked at the movie\u2019s false Holocaust narrative, she believes the film lends from a long tradition of Jews empathizing with their ancestors\u2019 persecution, and that for Squibb\u2019s character, \u201cit\u2019s as if she was there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey talk about Eleanor telling a lie, and I look at it a little bit differently, because when we celebrate Passover or any of the Jewish holidays, and we talk about the history and that we were slaves, we always say it as if we were there,\u201d said Zohar.<\/p>\n

As the remaining Holocaust survivor population sharply declines, Zohar said that continuing to contribute to Holocaust storytelling was \u201ca gift.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s extremely important, because you have to look at the age,\u201d Zohar said. \u201cI mean, there will come a time that there will be no survivors, and who will tell our story?\u201d<\/p>\n

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