Bella Schaechter-Gottesman, one of the few living Yiddish poets and songwriters, speaks about her life and work. Born in Vienna, Austria, she was raised in pre-war Chernovitz, Romania, one of the centers of Yiddish intellectual culture. She survived the Holocaust in the ghetto in Chernovitz and came to the United States in 1951. Active as a teacher and songwriter, she also began to write poetry and gained a reputation as one of America's premier Yiddish poets. Many of her songs cover a wide range of subjects from subway musicians, to personal reminiscences, to descriptions of street life in her hometown, the Bronx. The renaissance of klezmer music in the United States allowed her large repertoire of traditional and original material to be performed by many artists including Theodore Bikel, Adrienne Cooper, and Michael Alpert. In 2005, Bella Schaechter-Gottesman was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's top honor for folk arts, from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Cantor Jacob Mendelson .. explores the American roots of 'hazzanut' (Jewish liturgical music) while taking us on a musical voyage that spans the Atlantic, originating in his birthplace of Boro Park, Brooklyn and reaching all the way to Jerusalem"--Container.

Modeled on Children Must Laugh, a pre-war Yiddish film about Jewish orphans, this film incorporates newsreels, actual footage of children receiving aid, and a few staged sequences.

One of the few surviving documentaries depicting pre-war Jewish life in Poland and life at the Jewish Labor Bund's Medem Sanatorium, a model residential children's institution. The Medem Sanatorium, which existed from 1926 through 1942, stood as a symbol of health and enlightenment.