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Putting the British Jewish community on the big screen

Stephen Applebaum meets the people behind two new short films with a local Jewish flavour

September 27, 2023 15:47
1X6A1970-1
7 min read

Growing up, Barney Pell Scholes’s grandma would tell him about the day in 1947 that rioters attacked his grandpa’s family’s shop in Liverpool. The mob was enraged by reports of the killing of two kidnapped British soldiers in British Mandate Palestine by the Irgun — the so-called Sergeants Affair — and Scholes’s grandfather had to put on his RAF uniform to defend his livelihood against angry men throwing bricks and shouting antisemitic slogans.


This summer Scholes lent his grandfather’s medals to an actor playing him in a dramatised version of the riot, written by Scholes and shot at the Black Country Living Museum. He has high hopes for the short film that he is making with his childhood friend Tom O’Meara. He wants The Soldier of Smithdown Road to keep alive not only the memory of what his relatives did, but also of the threat that Liverpool’s small Jewish community faced, just two years after the liberation of Auschwitz.


Topics:

Film