Building an Identity: Jewish film festival ending on Wednesday is a fundraiser for new temple in Boone

Credit: Illustration Courtesy of Boone Jewish Community and Temple of the High Country

The planned temple, at the corner of West King Street and Poplar Grove Connector in Boone, would hold 200 people.

By: By Monte Mitchell | JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: September 15, 2009

BLOWING ROCK --

People sniffed and wiped away tears in the darkened theater, then applauded as the credits came up yesterday during a screening at the Jewish Film Festival at the Hayes Performing Arts Center.

The film was Blessed Is the Match: The Hannah Senesh Story, about a young Hungarian Jewish woman who was safe in Palestine in 1944, but parachuted into Europe on a mission to rescue Hungary's Jews during the Holocaust.

Captured by border guards and tortured by the Gestapo, she refused to give up information that would have betrayed her colleagues and was executed.

The Jewish Film Festival, a co-production of The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Moriah Films, Westglow Resort and Spa, and the Hayes Center, is a fundraiser for efforts to build a new Jewish temple in Boone.

"We're trying to build history and Jewish identity, but we're doing that because we want to build something very tangible, a Temple of the High Country," said Rabbi Aron Hier of the Wiesenthal Center.

The festival continues today at 2 p.m. with One Day You'll Understand and at 7 p.m. with Ever Again. It will end Wednesday, with a 2 p.m. showing of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and a 7 p.m. showing of Against the Tide. All shows are $5.

The festival is being held as Jews head into the High Holy Days, which will begin at sundown Friday with Rosh Hashanah.

Chuck Lieberman, the president of the Boone Jewish Community and Temple of the High Country, said the idea is to have a temple that can hold 200 people. That was one of the requests attached to a $1 million pledge from Bonnie and Jamie Schaefer, the owners of Westglow Spa.

Plans for the two-story building at the corner of West King Street and Poplar Grove Connector include a sanctuary for Shabbat and holiday services. The building would offer a home for the Jewish Film Festival and other events, including the annual Martin and Doris Rosen Summer Symposium on "Remembering the Holocaust," and would house the Schaefer Family Jewish Community Center.

Lieberman said that the group is about halfway in donations and pledges to meeting a goal of $3.8 million.

mmitchell@wsjournal.com

336-667-5691