Virtual Reality Brings New Look at the Holocaust
Through the innovative VR film “Triumph of the Spirit,” viewers in Jerusalem can travel virtually into the infamous concentration and death camp Auschwitz for a one-hour tour guided by Orthodox Holocaust historian Rabbi Israel Goldwasser
An innovative virtual reality film about the Holocaust has launched in Jerusalem.
The hour-long film, Triumph of the Spirit, was created by a team of three Orthodox Jewish women and a rabbi historian who serves as the movie’s narrator. It is designed to appeal to a global audience of any race, nationality, religion, or background.
The film, being shown in a dedicated space beneath Jerusalem’s Mamilla Mall, enables viewers to travel virtually to the infamous concentration and death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland and to feel as if they are physically standing there next to the narrator, Holocaust historian Rabbi Israel Goldwasser.
The production values are so high that every detail, down to each blade of grass, can be seen as vividly as in reality. Viewers can turn 360 degrees for a full view of everything around them.
The film was shot over three days in 2021, at the height of the COVID pandemic, by a dedicated team of three women, all mothers of young children.
Film director Miriam Cohen was pregnant, producer Chani Kopilowitz left a nursing baby at home, and editor Yutty Naiman had three children. With many modes of transport shut down during the pandemic, it took the women over 27 hours to reach the site from Israel. The shoot was made more difficult by a lack of food and drink at the site, and Cohen said her feet bled because she had nowhere to sit.
The Nazis established the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1940 and tortured and killed an estimated 1 million Jews there, as well as about 100,000 others, including Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti people, and others.
The film’s three creators each had a background in making movies for Orthodox women.
They said they were inspired to create Triumph of the Spirit because while secular schools in Israel regularly took students on educational trips to Poland, Orthodox schools did not.
The women felt that Holocaust education was too crucial for Orthodox schoolchildren to miss, and resolved to create an experience that would bring viewers as close as possible to being there.
They began fundraising for the film through family and friends and persuaded the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum administration to give them access to the site for three days in May 2021.
There they used drones to film a 360-degree panoramic view, while Goldwasser walked through the camp, explaining what happened in each area. The editors added survivor accounts to this.
In one particularly moving scene, a survivor describes how he despaired at the bleak camp conditions and resolved to die one night by throwing himself onto the camp’s electric fence.
As he ran towards the fence, however, he heard other prisoners singing songs of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival commemorating the community’s survival during ancient Greek persecution.
The songs stopped him in his tracks, infusing him with a feeling of being “bolted to the ground.” At that moment, he chose to continue living, he said.
Cohen told The Media Line that the scene had convinced a teenage girl who watched the pilot to continue living. She wrote to the creators, saying that she had tried several times to commit suicide, but that if the camp survivor could continue living “without a family, a mother, a father, and friends, alone in the entire world, then I can too.”
Goldwasser narrated the film in Hebrew, and it was then dubbed into English.
“I’ve had the honor of leading dozens of groups through Auschwitz, but this time, I felt this was the most powerful experience of all,” Goldwasser told The Media Line. He said it felt as if “the Jewish souls” who died in the camp were themselves “guiding me.”
The film ends with scenes of Israeli soldiers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem singing “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”), Israel’s national anthem. “We felt we could not leave viewers there” in Auschwitz, but rather “had to bring it back to Israel,” Cohen said.
We went in there with much respect. We felt that the Shoah [the Holocaust] is holy; you can’t touch it.
Speaking of filming and completing the project, Cohen said, “We went in there with much respect. We felt that the Shoah [the Holocaust] is holy; you can’t touch it.” As a result, they did not add any special effects, other than in one scene in which they showed how thick the black smoke was from the gas chambers.
As time goes on and the survivors pass away, Cohen said, “Memories are changing to history.”
“The difference between history and memory is that [survivors] heard, felt, and smelt something inside of them. History, by contrast, is outside of you,” she said.
The VR movie, Cohen believes, inserts “life into history and changes it into memory,” helping viewers go through a profound “emotional experience.”
Cohen said she was shocked at how little some viewers knew of the Holocaust. One viewer from Austria had never heard of the SS, the Nazi organization that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and executor of special projects, including the torture and murder of 6 million Jews.
Auschwitz survivors have expressed their gratitude for the film, Cohen said. One told Cohen she could shut her eyes and “know that when my friends and I are no longer here, someone will continue to tell our story.”
Cohen, Kapilowitz, and Naiman are hoping for additional funding to bring Triumph of the Spirit to schools and workplaces. Tickets to see the film cost 75 shekels each.
