Movie Review: The Vigil (2019)
03 Mar
Arts & Culture, Film, Latest

‘The Vigil’: Dark Night of the Soul

Keith Thomas’s new horror movie The Vigil centers around a night of shmirah, the act of guarding a dead body from the moment of death until burial. Serving as a shomer, a guard, is an unnerving task and one that seems ripe for the horror genre. “I couldn’t believe there had never been one” focused on a shomer, Thomas tells me over Zoom. Although perhaps it’s not so surprising considering the paucity of Jewish horror films out there. Even those with Jewish components usually use them more as gimmicks than as elements integral to the story. (Remember Matisyahu popping up as a dybbuk-fighting rabbi in The Possession.) With The Vigil, which is almost entirely in Yiddish and set in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, Thomas sets out to create a film “rooted in real Jewish experience and thought.”  The...

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01 Feb
History, Latest

The Golem in the Attic

By Kayla Green Tucked away in the snowy cobblestone streets of Prague’s Jewish Quarter stands a synagogue that is as old and significant as it is beautiful. With its high, pointed brown roof and few windows, the Old-New Synagogue  maintains old-world style without revealing its true age; built between 1270 and 1280, it is the oldest synagogue still in use in Prague. It defined the Jewish Ghetto, survived the Pogroms and the Holocaust and continues being used today. Embedded in the Shul’s ancient walls lies the history of Prague’s Jews, making it a riveting symbol of the community’s remarkable past. From the beginning, the Old-New Synagogue reflected the troubles of the Jewish community in Prague; hardships and anti-Semitism hindered the process of building the synagogue in ways still visible in its physical structure.  Because it was illegal...

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