A Bit of Israel in Toronto

This coming week, actress Razia Israely will be arriving in Toronto from Israel to perform at Toronto’s Fringe Festival as well at the Shalom Centre in Thornhill.

Israely has been on stage in Israel for over 30 years. Her career began at Tel Aviv University, where she studied with some of Israel’s most well-known instructors, such as Nola Chelton and Rina Yerushalmi. She began to act professionally while in her third year at university, when she joined a group who was performing at the Haifa Theatre. The first play she participated in as part of that group was Soragim, a play that depicted inmates in a prison.

“This was a documentary play, where you go out and meet characters and then portray them on stage,” says Israely. Following Soragim, Israely continued to act with the same group of actors, and from then went on to work in all the famous theatres in Israel: Btzavta, Habima National Theatre, the Cameri Theatre, Beit Lessin, and the Beersheba Theatre. She also appeared in a slew of Israeli movies and on television shows. She always fondly remembers Haifa, where she got her acting start, and returns to act there at every possible opportunity.

One of Israely’s most significant roles was in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. “The movie’s producer, Branko Lustig, came to Israel in order to audition people,” recalls Israely. “I performed a short piece from a play called Everybody Wants to Live by Hanoch Levin. I played a Polish prostitute who pretends to be French, and at the end I spoke with him in Polish. He was on the floor laughing and decided that I would be able to appear in the movie. Later on I did a second, more specific audition, with texts that Spielberg had written, and that’s how I got the part.”

In the movie itself, Israely played a small speaking role. “There’s a part in the movie where the women are lying in the sheds and talk about how they heard that they’ll be given soap as if to take a shower, but while in the shower they’ll be gassed,” explained Israely. “I had a line in that scene: ‘We are their workforce. What sense does it make to kill your own workers, to go to all this assembling of workforce only to kill us?’, and then I make a movement like a sword on my neck. I also appeared in a few other scenes. It was a small part.”

Despite her small role in Schindler’s List, Israely describes being in the movie as a one-time, unique experience. “First of all, to appear in an international film, is not something that is obvious,” she says. “Second, Spielberg recreated the scenes in the movie from documentary films that he saw, and then he reconstructed what he saw. He brought it to life. There are whole scenes in the movie where you sit and as you watch them, you understand that this is how things happened. You watch and you are sucked into the scene and for a moment you can’t figure out whether you’re watching a reconstruction or reality. And then you say to yourself, ‘Wow, this could be how my family died.’”

Israely’s connection to Schindler’s List and to the Holocaust in general is deeper since her father, who immigrated to Israel before World War II, lost his family in the horrors of the Holocaust. Israely is named after her paternal grandmother. In addition to the personal role, Israely explains that female Israeli actresses usually portray roles such as the mother of a soldier, the wife of a soldier, a bereaved mother, and of course, roles connected to the Holocaust. Israely herself appeared in a play entitled Nuremberg at the Haifa Theatre, in which she portrayed a prosecutor of five people. In order to prepare for the play, she received a book by Dr. Gideon Greiff titled We Wept Without Tears, which describes the testimonies of seven members of the Sonderkommando - the units that the Nazis operated and who, among other things, worked in the crematorium and were in charge of pulling bodies from the gas chambers before they were burned. Those units often included Jews.

Israely was deeply affected by the testimonials in the book, but was especially affected by one specific testimonial. “I read all the testimonials but the one that I was attracted to and read again and again was the testimony of the dentist, the one who pulled out the golden teeth from the mouths of the dead bodies,” she says. “Gideon wrote that the dentist died and the people close to him, his family members, abandoned him before he died. His daughter and son didn’t even attend his funeral. I thought to myself, how could it be that a person goes through such horrors and the people close to him abandon him? Of course, they didn’t even know what he went through during the Holocaust. During a period of 16 months, he opened 67 mouths in seven minutes, and he was always looking for golden teeth using two pliers.”

That summer, Israely travelled with her partner and her daughter to Poland in order to see the camps. Upon her return to Israel, she bought Greiff’s book and read it once again. It was then that she decided to write a play about the daughter of a member of the Sonderkommando. She called Greiff and asked him to provide him with names of people she could speak to for research purposes. Greiff gave her three names and Israely spoke with all three. Following the conversations, she wrote the monodrama The Dentist, which tells the story of a daughter of a member of the Sonderkommando. The play’s first version was 30 minutes long, and subsequently she prepared a 70-minute version that she performs today.

“I changed the story so it’s more dramatic,” explains Israely. “In the play, the father tells his daughter what he went through before he dies. The daughter travels to Paris to visit a friend, and the friend gives her more details. At the end, the father completes the story and tells his daughter more about his role in the Sonderkommando. I used Gideon’s material and added personal components from my own life, my house, and my childhood. I always include something from my personal life. For example, if my father used to yell in the middle of the night ‘Mama, mama!’ I incorporated that into the play. I gave it to Chaim Marin, who usually writes screenplays, and he’s the one who edited my work and gave me some advice.”

After working on The Dentist for about three years, Israely began performing in 2006. She has performed the play before both adults and teenagers. Last year, she performed the monodrama for the first time in English, at the Edinburgh Theatre in England. She did this 24 times during a period of one month, in August of 2009. For this purpose she hired a professional translator who wrote the English version, and, since English is not her mother tongue, she worked with a special teacher who helped her improve her English as well as teach her how to pronounce words correctly.

Now, Israely will be arriving in Toronto to perform The Dentist at the Fringe Festival. She is scheduled to perform seven times, between June 30 and July 11. She will also be appearing at the Shalom Centre in Thornhill on July 6 at 8:00 p.m., with another play titled Kmo Zikit (Like a Chameleon), this time in Hebrew. Kmo Zikit is a humourous play in which Israely portrays four characters belonging to a community theatre. The long-running play promises to have viewers rolling on the floor laughing.

For details on The Dentist at Toronto’s Fringe Festival, visit www.fringetoronto.com

Kmo Zikit will be playing at Shalom Centre, 361 Connie Cres., Concord, on Tues. July 6 at 8:00 p.m. To order tickets ($10 per person) please call 905-760-1888 or 416-635-2883 ext. 5316. Co-sponsored by the Shalom Centre and the Mifgash Program.