Boston premiere screening of the documentary Operation Wedding

The Dniepro Kehillah Project (DKP) of CJP, The Russian Jewish Community Foundation (RJCF) and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

presents Boston premiere screening + Q&A of the documentary Operation Wedding: the Jewish "wedding" that cracked open the USSR. Watch trailer (Synopsis below)

***

Meet Director Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov in person from Israel for Q&A after the screening!

With special guest: Taitana Bonner , Taitana Bonner, Scholar and daughter of the famous Soviet ​human ​rights activist, Yelena Bonner who smuggled Edward Kuznetsov's book from the Gulag.

Speakers:

Q&A after the screening with Director Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov

Bob Gordon Former Chairman of Dniepro Kehillah Project (DKP), Combined Jewish Philanthropies

Mark Kramer Program Director, Cold War Studies Program, Davis Center

Alex Koifman Former Jewish refugee from the USSR. President of the Russian Jewish Community Foundation (RJCF)

***

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Doors open 6:45PM →Opening speakers 7PM → Film screening 7:15PM → Q&A 8:15PM

CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium S010 Harvard

1730 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138

Parking:

Purchase a garage pass using the Davis Center code, which is 2020: https://onedaypermit.vpcs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/permit/purchase.pl

The closest of the Harvard garages would be Broadway or 52 Oxford Street.

***

OPERATION WEDDING

Documentary, 62 minutes l Israel-Latvia 2016

English, Hebrew, Russian / Subtitles: English

Leningrad, 1970. A group of young Soviet Jews who were denied exit visas, plots to “hijack” an empty plane and escape the USSR. ​

​It started as a fantasy, Operation Wedding, as outrageous as it was simple: Under the disguise of a trip to a local family wedding, the group members would buy every ticket on a small 12-seater plane, so there would be no passengers but them, no innocents in harm’s way. The group’s pilot would take over the controls and fly the 16 runaways into the sky, over the Soviet border, on to Sweden, bound for Israel.

Caught by the KGB a few steps from boarding, they were sentenced to years in the gulag and two were sentenced to death; they never got on a plane..

45 years later, filmmaker Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov reveals the compelling story of her parents, leading characters of the group, "heroes" in the West but "terrorists" in Russia, even today.