Five Cities

Yiddish titles. English title, "A Day in Warsaw" Pan, overview of city of Warsaw, street scenes, pedestrians, important modern multistoried buildings, cars, city square with pedestrians. Contrasted with old market square, narrow streets, Jewish quarter, including Zamenhof Street and the commercial Nalewki Steet where 400,000 Jews lived before WWII, and Jewish institutions, such as the community council, hospitals, schools and synagogues. Scenes of the modern parts of the city with large buildings, autos, and trucks meet with horse-drawn carriages, crowds, pushcarts, and porters in the bustling commercial district. Yiddish theater. Marketplace, overviews and CUs, chickens, children, clothing, bread, peddler. Zamenhof. Gensza cemetery. Poster for "Habima." Lines of pushcarts. Many exit synagogue after Sabbath services, and families pour into Krashinsky Park where children play and adults spiritedly debate the issues of the day. Yiddish newspapers. Crowds of Orthodox Jews in streets, shops closed for Sabbath. "The End" In 1938 and 1939, Shaul and Yitzhak Goskind of Warsaw-based Sektor Films produced six short films about urban Jewish communities in Poland. One, about Łódź, is lost. The other five-on Bialystok, Cracow, Lwow, Vilna, and Warsaw-have survived and are now called "Five Cities." These low-budget 35mm films were made for Landsmanshaften groups in America for fundraising purposes. On the eve of war, the Goskinds sent the films to Joseph Seiden, the prolific director in New York who distributed Yiddish newsreels and feature films in the US and Europe.