More than 100 people recently crowded Temple Anshei Shalom in Delray Beach to view local filmmaker Beach Richard Bloom's latest documentary, "Defending Holocaust History."

The film discusses the rise of the latest anti-Semitism movement coming out of Europe, originating primarily in the former Russian occupied controlled Eastern European countries, especially Lithuania, that "attempts to revise history by delegitimizing the Shoah as a unique act of genocide," Bloom said.

"I titled the film, 'Defending Holocaust History,' because the Shoah is under attack, not from deniers, nor from people who question the number of Jews murdered but from a growing number of intellectuals, politicians and historians from various countries who are now saying that the Shoah wasn't unique," he said.

"It is based upon an insidious, intellectual argument that equates the crimes of Stalin with the crimes of the Nazis in an attempt to obfuscate the issues," he noted. "While glorifying their own Nazi collaborators as heroes, blaming the victims as well as the heroic Jewish partisans, all in an attempt to downplay and disguise the role of their own people in the mass extinction of Jews."

Bloom added that "this is a film I had hoped I would not have to make."
The Delray Beach resident said that for the past 12 years he has been following the proliferation of anti Semitic events coming out of the former Soviet occupied countries of Eastern Europe, and has "watched in anguish as an intellectual form of anti-Semitism, an attempt to delegitimize the Holocaust as a unique genocidal event has rapidly gained momentum."

"This new attempt at revisionism has astonishingly been met with a lack of awareness and profound silence from the world community, the press, scholars, historians, and most sadly from even the worldwide Jewish community."

Bloom said he was encouraged to make the documentary by world renowned Yiddish scholar, author and historian, Dr. Dovid Katz, who has lived in Vilnius, Lithuania for many years and is "on the front lines of combating this rapidly spreading revisionism."
Others interviewed in the documentary include renowned Nazi hunter, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, both of whom "are on the front line in trying to combat this new form of revisionism," Bloom noted, and a number of Holocaust survivors. Also featured was an opposing viewpoint from a prominent Lithuanian official.

Bloom's last film, "The Litvak Connection," had its premiere at the PBC Jewish Film Festival and opened to a packed crowd.
Aryeh Rubin, a Miami-Dade businessman and founder of Operation Last Chance, and who was interviewed in Bloom's previous film, is a huge supporter of the filmmaker.

"Richard Bloom is a righteous person," the Aventura resident said. "He has put together films that say something. He is making a contribution."

Rubin was dismayed by recent reports of aging Nazi war criminals receiving U.S. Social Security checks.

"They should be kicked out. They shouldn't be getting anything," he said. "They should be hunted down, and even if they are dead — they should be exposed and shamed."

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