At Israeli premiere, ‘Miss Holocaust Survivor’ director struts celebration of life

HAIFA – They came with canes, walkers, and help from friends.

Even without a red carpet, the five former beauty pageant contestants, ranging in age from their 80s to 102, who star in the documentary “Miss Holocaust Survivor,” looked fiercely determined as they made their way into the auditorium in Haifa for the film’s first screening in Israel on Tuesday, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The women all receive help from Warm Home, a center for Holocaust survivors in Haifa run by Yad Ezer L’Haver, or Helping Hand, an organization dedicated to assisting needy Holocaust survivors in Israel, and the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem.

The two nonprofit organizations started the Miss Holocaust Survivor beauty pageant in 2012 to bring joy and recognition to members of Israel’s rapidly dwindling population of Holocaust survivors, garnering both attention and controversy.

Polish-born director Radek Wegrzyn, 47, who has lived in Germany for most of his life, told the Haifa audience that he first showed the movie in Berlin on November 9, 2023, a month after the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel had marked the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, spiking security concerns and antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere.

“Police with dogs checked to see if there were bombs in the theater,” Wegrzyn recalled.

“When people ask me if now is the time to show stories like this,” Wegrzyn said, “I tell them that now is very important.”

“I am always very adamant that I won’t let the discussion turn to, ‘You made a movie about Holocaust survivors. What about Palestine?’” the award-winning director told The Times of Israel on Wednesday. “The movie is about the lives of these Holocaust survivors, and they deserve to be the talking point of the day, and the recipient of emotions from the audience, and not day-to-day politics.”

However, politics intruded a few hours after the film’s screening, as Houthi rebels launched a ballistic missile toward Haifa, where the pageant has been held annually, and where Wegrzyn was staying for a few days.

Wegrzyn said that after finishing a documentary in war-torn Ukraine, he’s no stranger to sirens. But, he admitted, “your pulse still goes up.”

‘A little bit controversial’

The first Miss Holocaust Survivor pageant in 2012 was organized by Shimon Sabag, director of Yad Ezer L’Haver, and Dr. Isabella Grinberg, a Rambam Hospital psychiatrist who volunteers at the Warm Home.

At the screening, Grinberg told the audience that the pageant, in some small way, makes up for what the survivors endured in their past.

There are 123,715 Holocaust survivors in Israel, according to the Israeli Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority. Their average age is 87.

Wegrzyn said that as soon as he read about the Miss Holocaust Survivor pageant in a newspaper in 2016, “I knew I wanted to make this movie.”

The contest, he said, has always been “a little bit controversial.”

After the first pageant, Colette Avital, a former Labor member of Knesset and a Holocaust survivor, said that an exhibition “masquerading” survivors with “beautiful clothes is not what is going to make their lives more meaningful.”

Despite the criticism, the pageant has remained popular over the years, with winners chosen more on their personal stories of survival and rebuilding their lives than their physical beauty, according to Sabag.

The pageant has only been held once since 2018, due to the pandemic, war and other factors, but Sabag said he is hoping to bring it back this year.

“A lot of people have opinions about whether this is the right way to commemorate the Holocaust,” Wegrzyn said. “But for me, as long as these women are alive, as long as they make their decision whether this gives them joy and is a good thing for them — they’re the only ones who can judge whether they want to do this.”

The director said it was an honor for him to show the film in Haifa, where most of the documentary was set. A number of people who appear in the movie were present in the audience.

The film, which has been screened at a number of film festivals and was honored with a special 2024 award by the Ernst Lubitsch Prize in Berlin, is scheduled for a worldwide release on January 27, 2026, in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The documentary focuses primarily on Tova Ringer, now 102, and Rita Krasimow, 89, who both attended the screening. Ringer won the contest in 2018 and Krasimow was the runner-up.

Like the pageant, the film is both heartwarming and harrowing. Among its most riveting scenes is one in which Ringer recounts being sent to a dentist at Auschwitz after complaining of a terrible toothache.

With no anesthesia, the dentist pulled out all of her front teeth, she recalled, but left the troublesome tooth in her mouth.

In flashbacks during the film, Krasimow recalls surviving the Holocaust with her sister and parents in a pit in the Polish countryside for 19 months.

“It was like living in a grave,” she said. She attempted suicide by swallowing buttons, but as soon as the family left the pit one starry night, she said that all she could think of was, “I want to live.”

Warm roots

The film portrays the contestants, several of whom resided at the Warm Home, sometimes joking with one another and sometimes arguing.

Yudit Setz, ICEJ Aid deputy director and director of Holocaust Projects at Warm Home, said Yad Ezer L’Haver has operated the center since 2008 in response to the growing needs of aging Holocaust survivors.

It is estimated that approximately 25 percent of Israeli Holocaust survivors live below the poverty line, according to the National Insurance Institute.

Kassel Street, where the Warm Home is situated in Haifa’s Hadar neighborhood, gives a visitor the impression of a community.

The local people know the Warm Home residents, said Rachel Azaria, 88, who lives in an apartment just down a flight of stone steps from the main building.

“Jews, Arabs, everyone helps me around here,” she said.

The center offers free medical and psychological care, meals, classes in art, Hebrew, and dance, physical therapy, and other activities to Holocaust survivors. Currently, 50 survivors live in Warm Home apartments close to the main building.

About a dozen volunteers from Germany, Holland and Switzerland help the residents.

“There are 17 new people who moved from Ukraine two years ago who are very alone and they’re now part of our community,” Setz said, adding that the center’s goal is to give people “roots in their new land.”

“Some of them know nothing about Judaism,” Setz said. “It is ironic because recently, during Passover, the Christian volunteers were teaching Jews about the Jewish tradition of eating matzah.”

Sitting on her porch surrounded by flowers, Azaria said the volunteers “surround us with love.”

There are often delegations that come from other countries to meet with the residents. Azaria became agitated when she recalled a story about a German visitor whose great-grandfather was a Nazi responsible for killing the Jews of Bialystock, Poland.

“When he said that, I felt like I was stabbed in the heart,” Azaria said. Her mother was from Bialystok. Her entire family was killed there.

The man “said he was sorry, but what does it do for me?” Azaria asked rhetorically. “I grew up without a family.”

Moments later, her mood reversed when talking about her 24 great-grandchildren.

“They are my revenge,” she said.

Wegrzyn, who is based in Berlin, said his only personal connection to the Holocaust was through his grandmother, a Polish Catholic woman who was a prisoner in a Nazi labor camp during World War II.

The approach of the film is “celebrating life,” he said.

“There’s the necessity of commemorating, of telling the stories,” he said.

The women in the film “had incredible strength and beauty and decades of life” after the war.

“That was what really struck me,” he said.