Direction: Radu Gabrea
Original title: Moştenirea lui Goldfaden
Romania, 2004, 58 min.
Special Guest: Zalmen Mlotek. With the participation of: Eleanor Reissa, Itzitk Gottesman, Nahma Sandrow, Alyssa Pia Quint, Yale Strom, Harry Eliad, Iacov Bodo, Elisabeth Schwartz, Ioan Holban, Carol Markovitch, Golan Ofer, Sandler Gera.
Production: Total TV Bucharest

The Romanian Film Festival celebrates the Goldfaden Centennial 2008 with a documentary about Avram Goldfaden, founder of the Jewish Theatre and original playwright and pioneer of the Broadway musical (in whose honor the Goldies awards for excellence of the Hebrew Actors Union are named). This richly evocative film chronicles the 19th-century life of Abraham Goldfaden, who abandoned his rabbinical studies and went on to almost single-handedly create the modern Yiddish theater. Beginning with the first professional Yiddish theater performance—a two-act play in the city of Iaşi in Northern Romania—the documentary travels across Europe to Paris and London, and finally to New York. At his death in 1908 in New York, some 70,000 New Yorkers participated at the funeral procession, blocking all traffic in Manhattan in order to pay their last respect to the “Shakespeare of the Jewish people.” The film highlights the pre-war cultural relations between the local Romanian and Jewish population, as well as the influence of the New York Yiddish Theater on popular American culture, and the modern revivals of popular Yiddish theater productions.