A Pocketful of Miracles screening at Cornell Cinema

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A Pocketful of Miracles screening at Cornell Cinema

April 10 @ 7:00 pm 9:00 pm EDT

A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings
A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings. (provided)

“A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings”

Free Screening at Cornell University April 10, 2024 at 7:00PM

Click HERE to Reserve Tickets

Listed as one of the Best Films of 2023 by “The Washington Post” and Winner of the Audience Prize for Best Documentary at the JxJ Film and Music Festival, “A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings” screens at Cornell University (616 Thurston Ave., Ithaca, NY 14853) on April 10, 2024 at 7:00PM

“If you want me to describe my life in a few words, then it’s a ‘pocketful of miracles’. Things that I really can’t explain.” This is how David Ciesla describes his life. 

“A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings” is a family memoir focusing on the pre-war and wartime experiences of siblings Hanka Ciesla, who passed as a Polish Catholic within Germany, and Dudek Ciesla, who survived Auschwitz, and the story of Harold Kempner, who captured their reunion in Berlin as a military government journalist. Helen and David Ciesla’s life stories are indeed peppered with improbable coincidences and absurd strokes of luck, not to mention tales of remarkable fortitude and perseverance; similar to that of many Shoah survivors, and yet special and unique. 

Berlin-born filmmaker Aviva Kempner chronicles her mother’s and uncle’s lives before and during World War II, from their idyllic Jewish upbringing in Poland to their tearful reunion after surviving the Holocaust. This moving documentary ends by sharing the incredible lives they built in America as painter Helen Ciesla Covensky and businessperson and philanthropist David Chase and serves as a reminder of why it is so important to make films about the fate of those who survived.

Filmmaker Aviva Kempner will join for Q&A after the film with Professor Elliot Shapiro, Senior Lecturer in the Knight Institute and the Knight Foundation Director of the Writing in the Majors program.

Free admission. Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program.
To reserve tickets: https://cinema.cornell.edu/pocketful-miracles-tale-two-siblings 
Film website: www.pocketfulofmiraclesfilm.org

Cornell Jewish Studies Program

Cornell Cinema

104 Willard Straight Hall
Ithaca, New York 14850 United States
(607) 255-3522
View Venue Website

Details

Date:
April 10
Time:
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT
Formats:

Organizer

Cornell Jewish Studies Program
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A Pocketful of Miracles screening March 3 at the Katzen Arts Center

Echoes of Children’s Survival: Opening the Kestenberg Archive Online

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