JxJ Passport

SHTTL

Dates : March 7, 2026 — March 8, 2026

In one continuous shot, SHTTL shows the lives, loves, and inner conflicts within a Yiddish speaking shtetl on the border between Ukraine and Poland – one day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

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SHTTL

A young, aspiring filmmaker returns from Kyiv to his rural village on the border between Ukraine and Poland. He plans to run away with his true love who is engaged to another man, disrupting the balance of the whole town. In one unflinching shot, this film presents a day in the life of a Jewish village before it disappears.

SHTTL is the story of the inhabitants of a Yiddish Ukrainian village at the border of Poland, 24 hours before the Nazi invasion, known as Operation Barbarossa. Today, there are no such villages in existence; the production fully reconstructed a traditional ‘Shtetl’ outside of Kyiv, which is planned to be turned into a museum.

Conversation with Actor Moshe Lobel following the screening moderated by Natalya Lazar the Program Officer at the Division of International Academic Programs of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A native Yiddish speaker from Chasidic Brooklyn, Moshe Lobel debuted on the New York stage as the lead in New Yiddish Rep’s Awake and Sing. In 2018, he joined the cast of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, directed by Oscar and Tony Award-winner Joel Grey. The show won the Drama Desk award for best revival. Before starring in SHTTL, Moshe also appeared on HBO’s High Maintenance, Blumhouse’s The Vigil, and worked on Netflix’s Unorthodox. As a filmmaker, he co-created Untold Genius, an original comedy series featuring Emmy-nominated Jackie Hoffman and Stephen Tobolowsky, as well as Leibniz’s Law, a sci-fi drama.

Natalya Lazar is a Program Officer at the Division of International Academic Programs at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. There, she is responsible for building scholarly programs that focus on the Holocaust as it occurred in Eastern Europe, and specifically in Ukraine. Since June 2022 and until present, she manages a non-residential Virtual Ukraine Scholar Program for university faculty and Holocaust researchers based in Ukraine. In addition to holding a doctorate in political science from Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University in Ukraine (2006), Natalya is receiving a second PhD from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her dissertation focuses on Jewish experiences during the Holocaust in a borderland city of Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine). She has been a recipient of several prestigious academic fellowships, including Saul Kagan Claims Fellowship for the Advanced Shoah Studies, among others.