More Tales of Modern Collaboration Ideas

Polish Jewish Communist, having survived Treblinka, is ordered to help instigate pogroms against Jews in the towns surrounding his old shtetl. He is ordered to torch the synagogue where he was bar mitzvah'd and shoot his Kheder teacher.  

 The trial of Shalom Schwarzbard, done as paperwork, where eminent Jewish businessmen and lawyers collude by committee that this will be revenge for Dreyfus, and they work behind the scenes to make sure a liberal judge is chosen, liberal papers cover it and get inside information, and describe Schwarzbard's unbelievable, improbable biography.  

 1895: The shamesh of the Great Choral Synagogue in Odessa, describing the particulars of the service, the rich machers who sit in the front, the poor schnorrers who sit in the back. He describes his responsibilities to run the service, to sweep and mop the whole synagogue every day, to tutor bar mitzvah students, to make sure the right Yahrzeit candles are lit every day. Musaf is the only time off he gets during the entire week, and even then he has to peak his head in every two minutes to see how far they are from the Torah reading. Every Shabbes for the last year, two teens stand on the steps outside the synagogue. Before the Torah reading it's a Communist kid named Lev Bronstein, after the Torah reading it's a Zionist kid named Vladimir Jabotinsky. Every time they seem to give exactly the same speech as each other, condemning religion and extolling atheism, condemning the Russian nobility, condemning the rich Jewish collaborators, exhorting the working class 'not to be sheep,' just ending it with a solution that's slightly different. Both hours the poor Jews throw fruit at the poor speakers, while the goyisher coachmen throw horse dung at them. They keep speaking no matter what they're pelted with until they finish, at which point they go into the cafe across the street to clean themselves, then to the goyisher butcher next door to eat something.

Revolt in a Jewish retirement home in the 1920s because when the Jewish administration is converted to a state institution, they no longer serve kosher food and regularly feed pork. One retirees kills himself rather than eat it, another deliberately starves herself to death. Still others actively try to revolt, but the orderly instantly pushes the leader down, the leader breaks a hip, and everybody goes back to their rooms. 

1938: Told from the point of view of the Soviet Culture Minister. Sergei Eisenstein watches all his artistic friends go to the Gulag, realizes he's next unless he makes a movie Stalin will love. At a meeting with the Soviet Culture Minister which may determine his faith, he picks the subject Alexander Nevsky out of the blue: the Russian war against the Teutons (Germans) in the 12th century. The minister loves it: it's perfect propaganda against the Nazi regime, reports it to Stalin and then calls Eisenstein and says Stalin loves it. Stalin personally grants Eisenstein an unlimited budget. Eisenstein makes an epic of unprecedented expense and scale, comes up with all kinds of new techniques. The film premieres, he gets a standing ovation, Stalin tells him he's creating an award for distinguished service and Eisenstein will be the first recipient. It is going to be shown at every cinema in the USSR. It will be sent to America and Western Europe and China for Soviet propaganda. Eisenstein is carried on people's shoulders and drunkenly paraded around Moscow as the greatest artist in the Soviet Union. The next day Eisenstein finds out the showings are cancelled, the culture minister doesn't return calls, Eisenstein has no idea why. Then he hears at his office from his secretary: 'didn't you hear? the Soviets signed a pact with the Germans.' Eisenstein realizes he's back on the blacklist. 

1948: Soviet commissar files a bureaucratic report about Golda Meir's arrival in Moscow to be Israeli ambassador and her welcome from the Jewish community. The 50,000 Jews lining the streets, the singing of Hatikvah, the chants of Am Yisrael Chai, singing of 'Birkhat Am' and the church hymn "How Glorious is Our Lord in Zion". The commissar makes what he thinks will be a career ending, possibly life ending proposition: the Soviets must reverse their position on antisemitism and portray Jews as the enemy. They are now a potential fifth column for Israel and must be treated as such: their culture crushed, their books burned, their language prohibited, their leaders disappeared. 

Pretoria: 1963. The Rivonia Trial Nelson Mandela is brought up on charges with seven other anti-Apartheid activists who are prosecuted for being the main culprits in the African National Congress's armed wing. Both the main prosecutor and 4 of the 5 defense attorneys are Jews, and part of the trial itself takes place in the 'Old Synagogue' (Pretoria Hebrew Congregation). The whites sit downstairs where the men sat, the blacks upstairs where the women sat. It's told from the point of view of the one Jewish defendant, South African communist Denis Goldberg. There's lots of prison racism, and the other prisoners, most of whom not knowing he's Jewish, taunt him for sitting at Mandela's table and threaten to beat him up "a perfectly pure white polluting his blood sitting with the Africans", after he leaves Mandela says "It's amazing they see you in the shower every day and don't know who you are." He doesn't say anything at the table with Mandela but in his writing he comments on Yutar, Chakalson, Fischer, Hanson and Joffe. He's never met any of them before the trial but feels he knows them instantly and diagnoses them socially down to the Johannesberg streets he thinks they grew up on. When he shares his points of view with his defendant cellmate, the cellmate rushes him over at dinner to Madiba to tell him the observations he told in the cell. Mandela only knows Goldberg as a professional associate beforehand, just an engineer who makes weapons for them, but from this moment on they grow close, and the more he gets to know Madiba the more he sees Mandela transformed into a symbol, a kind of prophet or saint. Even then, he feels disappointed that he hasn't gotten to know the real Mandela at all, just a play-actor posing for history. But then he sees the transformative effect Madiba has on the prisoners, who suddenly work to live better. He de-escalates fights with racist white prisoners who try to beat him up, and one of them breaks down in tears and Madiba hugs him. The warden and guards, at first persecutory and prejudiced, selecting Mandela and his co-defendants for specially bad treatment, begin to be apologetic, then friendly and jocular, and soon begin offering Mandela gifts, which Madiba turns down--when one of the other defendants accepts he takes the defendant aside and slaps him across the face. When it's time for Mandela to give his speech before the court, he incorporates all sorts of things from his conversation with Goldberg, and before he sits down gives Goldberg a quick wink.