Madrid before Hanita (Jews from Palestine in the International Brigades)

With his documentary Madrid Before Hanita (Jews from Palestine in the International Brigades), filmmaker Eran Torbiner reflects on the segment of the Jewish population that baffled the Zionist community and the Palestinian Communist Party by traveling to Spain to counter the Fascist forces of the Spanish Civil War. The participants rightly regarded Fascism as the world's great evil and as the foremost threat to the Jewish race, and thus felt a kinship with the forces battling General Franco and others. In his film, Torbiner couples interviews with the handful of surviving volunteers -- who reflect on the vicissitudes of their experiences in Spain -- with recitations from letters and journal entries of the day and period archival footage. Hebrew, Spanish, German and Polish with English Subtitles (hard-coded)