Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Madeline \u201cMima\u201d Kohn\u2019s late grandmother, Esther Rasch, grew up in S\u0103cel, Romania, a small village once home to a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community. <\/p>\n
But like many Jewish Europeans during the Holocaust, Rasch was stripped of her citizenship, forced from her home, and deported to Auschwitz with her parents and nine siblings.<\/p>\n
Only she and five of her siblings survived. <\/p>\n
After World War II, Rasch migrated to Hillside, N.J., in the late 1940s. She died in 2007 when Kohn was 3 years old, leaving her granddaughter with only faint memories of her. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was very close with my Jewish community. That history was really important, but I didn\u2019t actually know anything about their lives before they came to the U.S.,\u201d Kohn, 23, said. \u201cThey just appeared here one day, and I think subconsciously, I was exploring that.\u201d <\/p>\n
Growing up in Lower Merion<\/a>, Kohn learned about her grandmother through stories told by her mother, Monica Rasch. But when her mother died in 2015, Kohn lost another connection to her family\u2019s past.<\/p>\n What remained were 50 photographs of her grandmother and a nine-hour video documenting Esther Rasch\u2019s return to Romania in the 1980s. Much of what Kohn knew about her grandmother\u2019s early life came from watching that footage.<\/p>\n In July 2024, Kohn decided to retrace her grandmother\u2019s steps, traveling to Romania to visit the places she had seen in the video. Her 10-day journey became I Don\u2019t Know What I\u2019m Doing Here<\/a>, a documentary premiering at the Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media Festival<\/a> on Nov. 17.<\/p>\n \u2018We all come from a place\u2019<\/p>\n Kohn, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania<\/a>, wanted to walk the same pastures, elementary school hallways, and synagogue aisles her grandmother had described in the video.<\/p>\n She hoped to create her own memories of the village and understand why, decades after the Holocaust, her grandmother had chosen to return. <\/p>\n \u201cI had to go to Romania to realize that my grandmother was actually from there,\u201d Kohn said. \u201cSo much of the discovery was almost self-evident, but at the time, I didn\u2019t really feel like I could internalize that.\u201d<\/p>\n The film begins with Kohn\u2019s friend, Jacob Pincus, 23, who directed the documentary, flying from Los Angeles to meet Kohn in Cluj, Romania. <\/p>\n With 18-year-old translator Ayana Stefanescu as their guide, they visit shops, restaurants, and historical sites, including the Ethnographic Museum and Elie Wiesel Memorial House. <\/p>\n They walk through the Romanian heat to the Maramure\u0219 County Branch of the National Archives, where Kohn discovered her grandmother\u2019s birth and school records. <\/p>\n Although Kohn couldn\u2019t locate anyone who knew her grandmother, or other documents that could speak to her family\u2019s history, she found a sense of \u201crootedness\u201d in her visit. <\/p>\n \u201cThat was something I never felt before,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n \u201cIn college, I didn\u2019t feel I had a set professional aspiration. I didn\u2019t know what I was doing here, and I think subconsciously, I knew that I needed some inspiration from earlier generations. I needed to go back and look at something concrete.\u201d<\/p>\n When she was growing up, Kohn said, her grandparents avoided talking about their home countries due to the trauma and loss they endured during World War II. <\/p>\n \u201cI was told, \u2018Forget about that chapter. It\u2019s bad,\u2019\u201d Kohn said. \u201cThere are a lot of people, especially from my parents\u2019 generation, who refused to go [back] to Germany and Poland because they don\u2019t want to support the economies of these countries, and I deeply understand that.\u201d <\/p>\n But Kohn believes that she and others who are generations removed from the Holocaust can benefit from making these journeys. By avoiding these experiences, she said, they are \u201ccutting [themselves] off from the positive and fulfilling aspects of the history.\u201d <\/p>\n Pincus said that was the most significant theme they wanted to convey in the film. <\/p>\n \u201cWe all come from a place,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just specific to Romania. We\u2019re all drawn to certain places because we\u2019re from there. That was me at age 16 going to Poland, where most of my family is from. That feeling is what I connected with.\u201d <\/p>\n A \u2018gift\u2019 for future generations<\/p>\n For Kohn, the journey began as a historical research project. <\/p>\n She received a $2,500 grant from Penn to travel to Romania, which she used to cover airfare, lodging, research, and a translator. <\/p>\n Making a documentary film was not in the plans until Pincus came along for the journey. The two friends met at age 16 during a Holocaust history trip to Poland, and have traveled together extensively in the years since. <\/p>\n Pincus, who dropped out of film school at the University of Southern California before flying to Romania, brought a 15-year-old point-and-shoot camera, a microphone, and a few film accessories tucked into a toiletry case. <\/p>\n During their trip, he compiled vlog-style testimonies from Kohn and B-roll of the Romanian landscape and historical sites. They soon realized the impact this story could have for an audience, so Pincus spent nearly a year repackaging the footage into a more comprehensive visual experience. <\/p>\n In the time since the trip, Kohn moved to Brooklyn to pursue a career in real estate development, with an interest in urban religious communities, including those across the Jewish diaspora. <\/p>\n At its core, Kohn said, the film is about \u201cchasing belonging and finding familiarity.\u201d And while she left Romania with unanswered questions about her lineage, she and Pincus felt \u201cgratitude\u201d because of the lives they had in the United States. <\/p>\n Pincus said those lives wouldn\u2019t be possible without the sacrifices of earlier generations. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re trying to help people remember that we come from people who sacrificed for us to be alive. And as soon as that\u2019s lost, we are lost,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n For Kohn, that feeling came full circle when she incorporated footage from an oral history video her mother had made into the documentary. Hearing the voices of three generations who share \u201cstrikingly\u201d similar views of the world, Kohn said, provided \u201call the validation I was looking for.\u201d <\/p>\n It also helped her answer the existential question posed in the film\u2019s title.<\/p>\n \u201cI discovered I do have roots. I do have role models, even if I didn\u2019t spend that much time with them. I do have a path. I do belong,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n \u201cI Don\u2019t Know What I\u2019m Doing Here\u201d is screened as part of Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media Festival on Nov. 17, at 7 p.m., at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, 101 S. Independence Mall E, Philadelphia, phillyjfm.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min Madeline \u201cMima\u201d Kohn\u2019s late grandmother, Esther Rasch, grew up in S\u0103cel, Romania, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":325609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[131897,183,185,184,186],"class_list":["post-325608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lower-merion","tag-jewish-film-festival-romania-holocaust-family-documentary-madeline-kohn","tag-lower-merion","tag-lower-merion-headlines","tag-lower-merion-news","tag-lower-merion-township"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}