‘Quality programming appropriate for all ages.’ This sentence, seemingly so simple, is larded with qualifiers, especially in 2011.   For 50 years, Paulist Productions, founded by the indomitable Paulist priest Elwood ‘Bud’ Kieser, has navigated that narrow entertainment bracket by relying on strong stories that resist both spiritual didactism and crass sensationalism.   The Pacific Palisades film company, ensconced in the Spanish Revival building on Pacific Coast Highway’the infamous Thelma Todd Caf’continues its dedication to programs that ‘challenge our viewers to love others, and to liberate one another from all that is dehumanizing.’   Now under the leadership of Fr. Eric Andrews, the company is headed into new territory, exploring myriad programming platforms, including Internet and DVD.   Andrews, who took over as president in September 2009 from Fr. Frank Desiderio, came in on the production phase of ‘The Lost Valentine,’ the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that aired in January on CBS.   The story starred Betty White, as a woman who returns to the train station on her wedding anniversary, Valentine’s Day, where she said good-bye to her husband who was shipping out to the Pacific, and who later was missing in action. His ultimate fate remains a mystery. Jennifer Love Hewitt (‘The Ghost Whisperer’) assists in solving the mystery.   The drama was the highest-rated show on that Sunday night, and number three in the weekly ratings.   Parlaying that success, Andrews has been able to take stories, pitched to Paulist Productions that are in various stages of development, while also furthering his own ideas within the Hollywood community.   ’The Hallmark project was a good human drama and people related to it, but that lasts only for so long,’ Andrews says. ‘I hope that a year from now we have several very strong projects that work on cable and/or on a network slot.’   Understanding that ‘even the most distinguished people in town are having a hard time [funding projects],’ Andrews says that the Hallmark project helped him establish more relationships in the industry, but that ‘we’re going to have invest more of our endowment to fund new projects in the short run.’   Fr. Kieser incorporated Paulist Productions in the late 1960s, separate from the Paulist Fathers, for purposes of fundraising. All the money in the endowment has come from donations and proceeds from feature films. The company is not in the moneymaking business, but has a well connected advisory board that helps raise funds. Palisadians who serve as advisors include writer Jim McGinn, producer Mike Sullivan, and producer Vin Di Bona (‘America’s Funniest Videos’).   Andrews, 46, comes to the job with a business and film background. In fact, it wasn’t until after he graduated from New York University Film School and worked at The Jim Henson Company that he pursued his religious calling. The Paulist community originally appealed to him because of its focus on communications as a means of teaching. He was ordained in 1995 and first served as associate pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York City until 1999, when he worked for a year as executive producer of Paulist Media Works.   Andrews then served six years as associate pastor/campus minister at John XXIII University Parish at the University of Tennessee, where he learned fundraising and managing personnel.   ’I took this job [Paulist Productions] against my better judgment,’ Andrews says, halfway in jest. ‘I’ve worked in showbiz; it’s hard work and there are hard deals. This is a sport for younger people.’ However, he claims confidence as a communicator and schmoozer’much like Fr. Kieser, known as ‘The Hollywood Priest,’ who was a master at getting top talent in Hollywood to work for him for a pittance. ‘People will do for God what they won’t do for money,’ said the charismatic Kieser, who died in 2000.   ’Bud built this company at a time when commercial stations had to give away 30 minutes of programming a week,’ Andrews explains. ‘It could be scattered over a week or used all in one piece.’ With that window, Kieser launched ‘Insight,’ the half-hour anthology series that ran on Sunday mornings from 1961 through 1983.   ’He sold it market by market, so eventually ‘Insight’ was syndicated all across the U.S. He was not afraid to take on controversial issues, like drug abuse, teen sex, cloning, and even corrosion in the media. In 1982, he did a mock reality show in which a person was promised $1 million to play Russian roulette with their loved one.’   Andrews is talking to Martin Sheen, who has starred in many Paulist productions throughout the years, about a retrospective documentary on ‘Insight.’ Another project in the works is a reality piece, ‘Should I Marry You?’ that will offer a format for questions that might help couples make decisions.   ’After my 16 years of preparing couples for marriage, I have questions,’ Andrews says, adding that he is still working out how best to structure the program, but that it would have to be ‘watchable, celebratory and entertaining.’

In November 1940, a secret archive was established in the Warsaw ghetto to collect and preserve documentation of the life and struggles of Polish Jews under German occupation. Only three of 60-odd members of the archive, organized by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and meeting on Saturdays under the name ‘Oyneg Shabes’ (‘the Joy of the Sabbath’), survived the war. But essays, photographs, poetry and even small markers of everyday life, like menus, tram tickets and ration cards, were preserved. Surreptitiously buried in 10 tins and two milk cans, they were unearthed in 1946 and 1950.   The 25,000 or so precious documents of the Ringelblum archives went largely untouched for years. ‘The people who were fluent in Yiddish, who were survivors ‘ were just trying to get over their own stories, they were trying to put their lives together,’ says long-time Pacific Palisades resident Sarah Moskovitz, Ph.D., who spent nearly ten years translating the Yiddish poetry recovered from the cans.   Much of the work in her translation, ‘Poetry in Hell,’ (available on the Internet at poetryinhell.org) had been written or recorded in the Warsaw ghetto. The largest of such locked districts in Poland, the ghetto was a 1.3-square-mile area housing more than 400,000 Jews, forced to leave their homes and livelihoods and suffer deprivation and squalor until most were systematically killed.   The poems ‘range from truly great to amateurish,’ Moskovitz says. But ‘my idea was’anything that they dared to collect during the war, that they dared to write under the circumstances of starvation and disease and slave labor ‘ I’m not going to be the judge, I’ll translate it.   ’I was fortunate to be born in this country,’ says Moskovitz, whose Polish parents moved to America in the 1920s. From the age of 13, she was aware of the ghetto and the concentration camps. ‘My parents talked about not having received any mail’ from relatives in Poland, and she lost aunts, uncles and a cousin, killed in Warsaw, Biala Podlaska, Treblinka and Babi Yar.   She felt called to take on the translation because ‘I could do it and I maybe owed doing it,”to her family, to the poets and even to all those she didn’t know who lost their lives. ‘I felt I had a responsibility.’   She began work in earnest shortly after retiring in 1997 from her work as a teacher, psychotherapist and scholar of human development at Cal State Northridge. CSUN gave her a grant to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but the bulk of the work was done at her own expense.   Moskovitz learned of the archives through historian Samuel Kassow, author of a book on the Oyneg Shabes, ‘Who Will Write Our History?’ The chief cataloguer at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Aleqsandra Borecka, a poetry lover and Polish Catholic whose mother hid two Jewish women during the war, helped Moskovitz track down documents. Many of the poems, neglected underground, were in terrible condition, missing words, lines or stanzas. Moskovitz worked from 80 to 90 reels of microfiche acquired by the Holocaust Museum from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Her husband, Itzik, scanned each frame to look for poetry, convert it to a digital format and then make it legible, sometimes taking nearly a week to adjust a single frame.   Moskovitz spoke only Yiddish until she went to kindergarten and credits her love of poetry to her father, Yitzkhok Traister, a principal and teacher in the Workmen Circle Yiddish schools in Massachusetts and Los Angeles.   She grouped the poems under five headings: (1) nature; (2) home, love, life; (3) ghetto, hunger, struggle; (4) death, anger, mourning; and (5) tradition, faith and protest, in that order.   ’I intuitively felt that I could not start off with the most traumatic ghetto poems,’ she says. She hopes that the sequence is ‘like diving in through warmish water to the depths and coming up and out, back to life in some way.’   One piece by the great poet Yitzhok Katzenelson, not found in the Ringelblum archives, but written in the Warsaw ghetto and included in Moskovitz’s work, called those in the ghetto to an evening of Torah study. It was written and circulated the day the ghetto was locked, in what Moskovitz calls ‘an act of resistance and bravery.’   Though Katzenelson was a secular Jew, the poem movingly speaks of God in the Tanakh, the three books of the Jewish holy scriptures”in every corner there, in every crevice you will detect and sense ‘ God!’   ’He understood that when people are isolated in tragic trouble, they need to cling to something. What better thing to rely on than studying the Torah?’ Moskovitz asks. ‘He was searching to comfort his people.’   Asked about the emotional toll of her work, she looks at her husband of more than 63 years. ‘I wasn’t alone doing it; he was really supporting me.   ’I was answering a very important question for myself,’ she says. ‘Growing up, I wondered, ‘What would it be like if I were there?”   She held one poem, also by Katzenelson, until last, putting off her translation for almost three years. ‘The Day of My Great Disaster’ tells of the day the poet returned home with his son Zvi to find that his wife, Hannah, and two younger sons had been taken to the trains (which would transport them to Treblinka, a death camp). Moskovitz wrote a poem of her own about that interval, which begins, ‘I did not want to go into that empty room with you.’   But some of the Ringelblum poems strike a surprisingly hopeful note, as in ‘Like a Miracle’ by Zusman Segalovitch, which recalls, ‘Even in our street, when hate swells grand with khutspa, the little lilac twig stretches out to you and me like a miracle.’   Moskovitz’s son, David, persuaded her that publishing the poems in digital form on the Internet, was ‘the democratic solution’ to distributing her work and would help the poems find their way to the most readers. The translated poetry is accompanied by images of the originals.   ’I want people to know that there’s buried treasure’ Moskovitz says. ‘Even in the most oppressive circumstances, some people could care about poetry, about writing, about preserving things for others that would survive. I think there’s a lot of inspiration in this.’

‘In Search of Biblical Lands: From Jerusalem to Jordan in 19th-Century Photography,’ on view at the Getty Villa through September 12, features more than 100 of the first photographic images of the Holy Land. The region at the eastern margins of the Mediterranean is one of the most photographed places on earth, both spiritually compelling and physically forbidding. The photographs on view in this exhibition reveal what the travelers of the 1800s discovered on their journey’remains of ancient kingdoms, evocative geography and timeless scenes of pastoral life’a landscape of belief and its people. The show features rare early daguerreotypes, salted-paper prints and albumen silver prints, created between the 1840s and 1900s. Highlights are photographs by English photographer Francis Frith, whose compelling images were made during three trips to the Holy Land in the late 1850s, and daguerreotypes by French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey from his three-year tour of the Near East. It is organized into five sections: Jerusalem, Early Views, Peoples of the Bible, Travels in Bible Lands and Expeditions Beyond the Dead Sea. Because of the delicate nature of the photographic materials that cannot be displayed for long periods, the exhibition is divided into two installments, each on view for three months. Subjects include Bethlehem, Nazareth, Petra, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Damascus Gate, Saint Stephen’s Gate, the Ecce Homo Arch, the Al Aqsa Mosque, Walls of the Temple Mount, The Garden of Gethsemane, the Dome of the Rock, the River Jordan, the Pool of Hezekiah and Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Museum visitors can also see the region up-close through stereoscope tours on two large stereo viewers that digitally create a three-dimensional immersive experience. Explorers, entrepreneurs, amateurs, academics and tourists descended upon the Holy Land in the 19th century to photograph sites previously only imagined. While the shared legacy of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths formed a space of enormous spiritual significance, there was pressure to create images that assured people that the landscape and places so important to them from Bible study or religious observance were real and even dramatic. It proved no easy task, as what they saw did not fit with the Holy Land of their imagination, fostered by idealized illustrations and common rhetoric’Jerusalem being the ‘shining city on the hill,’ or Palestine ‘the land of milk and honey.’ ‘There were no big ruins as in Egypt, no soaring mountains as in the American West, but the humble reality of small villages, ancient footpaths winding along steep hillsides had tremendous emotional weight for people,’ explains Kathleen Stewart Howe, professor of art history, director of the Pomona College Museum of Art and guest curator of this exhibition. For information, visit getty.edu.