Schocken, On the Verge of Concensus

ISRAEL / GERMANY 2020, 75 MIN, HEBREW AND GERMAN

Salman Schocken was the King of Department stores in Germany. Before WWII he owned 22 department stores with 6000 employees. He possessed a unique collection of 60,000 rare books in German and Hebrew and founded a modern, Jewish publishing house.

 He was the lifelong supporter of Shmuel Yosef Agnon and the owned Haaretz newspaper which until today survives on the border of consensus.

“When a man determines his circumstances as much as possible and allows them todetermine his fate as little as possible” by Goethe was his life’s credo.

He supported secular, Jewish culture and identified with humanist, liberal Judaism, a relic of Europe in the C19th. His life mirrors the rollercoaster of German Jewry, between its peaks and the abyss, in the first half of the 20 th Century.

Today in an age of unscrupulous market economy and militant Judaism, Salman Schocken’s ways point to an alternative, perhaps not entirely lost.

The film was first screened during the DocAviv Film Festival on September 7th.

Director & Script: Noemi Schory
Production: Liran Atzmor, Gerd Haag
Production Company: Atzmor Productions, Tag/traum
Editing: Michal Oppenheim
Cinematography: Uriel Sinai
Additional Cinematography: Itay Vinograd
Research: Noemi Schory, Amikam Goldman
Sound Design: Itzik Cohen
Music: Boaz Schory