March of Time -- outtakes -- Munkacs: Prewar Jewish life: rabbi, wedding, children

The time codes on the DigiBeta copy of this tape are: 04:01:03 to 04:09:56 Outtake from the edited March of Time story "Jewish Peasants." Cameraman's dope sheet available in departmental files. The wedding took place on March 15, 1933. It is unclear whether all events in the film are also in 1933. The musicians playing in the chupah are the Oppermans (klezmer music begins at 02:47). Learn more about the Opperman family of musicians at http://www.yiddishdance.com/Turka_eng.pdf. Genia Opperman and her sister Renee (pictured in https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1095427) were on the Kindertransport from Vienna to France, where they spent the war. Genia eventually made it to England where she was reunited with her daughters after the war. Their father, Joseph Spindel, was murdered in Auschwitz after being captured in France. For information relating to this footage, including the identifications of several subjects, see this Israeli documentary produced in concert with Yad Vashem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UppnE8V4OGY.

Munkacs (Mukacevo) was transferred from Czechoslovakia to Hungary in November 1938. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust describes Munkacs as "one of the largest centers of Orthodoxy and Hasidism in Hungary..., among the first towns to be emptied of Jews in 1944. Together with other Jews of the Transcarpathian Ukraine, the local Jews were ordered into a ghetto during the second half of April 1944.... After the war, the town was transferred to the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic." Munkacs was also an important Zionist center. Content identified by Nava Schreiber, Roberta Newman, Daniel Soyer, Severin Hochberg (USHMM historian), and various newspaper accounts. The wedding took place on March 15, 1933. 20,000 people attended coming from far and wide. According to "Rudy Vecernik" (Munkacs daily newspaper): The wedding lasted for seven days. The bride was 18 year old Frime Chaje Rifke. She was the Munkacs Rebbe's only daughter. The marriage was arranged when she was 12 years old and she saw her future husband for the first time at the wedding. The Grand Rabbi of Munkacs was Chaim Elazar Shapiro (variously given as Shapira, Spira, Spiry) (1871-1936). He was a supporter of the local Agrarian right wing party and did not support the Zionist movement. It is reported that he put a curse on the newly opened Zionist Gymnasium. According to George Havas (a Hungarian man from Munkacs now living in the DC area), the childless marriage was short lived. The bride was sent to a sanatorium where she spent the rest of her life. The groom, Baruch Rachmil Josua Rabinnovits, came from a well-known family of Polish Rebbes.