Boris Kapilevich is seated in a leather chair in front of a fully stocked bookcase in his Mountain View home, dressed in a black button-down shirt. Staring impassively into the camera, he begins to speak in heavily accented English, a remnant of his childhood in Minsk, Belarus.
“Hello to everybody,” he begins. “My name is Boris Kapilevich. I happen to be a survivor of the Holocaust.”
Kapilevitch, 89, is one of 391 Holocaust survivors receiving help from Jewish Family Services Silicon Valley, a Los Gatos–based nonprofit that has undertaken a new project: to record testimonies of the aging Holocaust survivors it supports for a documentary.
Kapilevich was eager to take part. He was 5 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, occupying Minsk. His father left to fight with the Red Army, and he and his mother survived — first the Minsk Ghetto, and then more than a year living in a forest with a partisan brigade.
“This history should never be forgotten,” he told J. in a Zoom interview. “There are so many connections to what is happening today, so many important points people should understand. But the younger generation doesn’t know much about it. First of all, they’re not interested. The more we can do to reach young people and give them some knowledge about it, we must do it, visually and in writing.”
Established in 1978, JFS Silicon Valley is one of 170 member organizations in the Network of Jewish Human Services Agencies, scattered across North American cities. These social service agencies trace their roots to the 19th century, when Jews sought to establish a communal safety net amid an increase in immigration from Europe. Today, these charities help many non-Jews, support aging Holocaust survivors, help resettle refugees and much more.
JFS Silicon Valley provides home-care services to 155 of the Holocaust survivors it serves, helping with activities of daily living such as bathing and dressing. The agency helps all the survivors in its care with emergency services, including rent, food, dental bills, etc. “Most of them are well into their 90s, and some are more than 100,” said Lucy Istomina, the agency’s senior care manager for Holocaust services. “As they age, their needs, of course, increase.”
Some have told their stories to schoolchildren, or have spoken briefly at Holocaust commemorations. Many have not. But all are growing more frail with each passing year.
To preserve their stories, told in their own words, JFS has embarked on a project to interview as many as possible. The videos will be edited to form the basis of a full-length documentary that the agency hopes to get into film festivals and, eventually, onto home screens.
“Our original plan was to just post our short videos on YouTube, to draw people to our site,” said board member Hal Hendrickson, who has some videography experience and acts as the project’s main interviewer. But when he met with Kevin Surace, a vice president at the New York–based production company WitzEnd, “Kevin told me I was thinking way too small. He said we need to make a 90-minute documentary and submit it to film festivals.”
Surace told the board he would raise the funds needed to produce the film.
That’s good, because JFS does not have spare cash lying around for such an ambitious project. The agency has grown tremendously in the past few years. Istomina said that when she was hired in 2021, the agency could afford to provide home care services to about 25 clients on a budget of $283,000. Today the agency’s annual home care budget is $7.7 million, virtually all of it from a Claims Conference grant from the government of Germany obtained two years ago.
That money only covers home care, said Debbie Michels, JFS vice-president of community engagement. It doesn’t cover medical or emergency needs, or anything beyond the home visits. To help cover those additional costs, JFS got together with Kavod Shef, a Holocaust survivors emergency fund that provides $100,000 a year that JFS must match, together with help from Jewish Silicon Valley, the local Federation.
Virtually all of the survivors helped by JFS live below the poverty line, Michels noted, relying on their monthly SSI payments of about $900 a month. And during the recent government shutdown, survivors lost their SNAP benefits of $200 a month, putting further strain on their already limited funds.
“We are their safety net, to help them with food,” Michels said, referring to the agency’s monthly food bank and food bags delivered on Jewish holidays.
Unfortunately, she said, it’s very difficult to raise money for Holocaust survivors. “It’s not a topic people want to hear about,” Michels said. “And they’ve been through so much.”
Hence the documentary project, both to preserve survivor stories for future generations, and to raise awareness of the growing needs of an albeit shrinking population.
So far, JFS has interviewed nine survivors.
“A lot are hesitant,” Hendrickson said. “They might have told their story before and maybe it wasn’t received correctly. Or they might not want to relive it.”
The nine who agreed “run the gamut,” he said. Some were babies when World War II started. Two or three of them were teenagers during the 1941-44 siege of Leningrad.
Kapilevich said he has shared his story with his own family, and was fortunate that it struck a chord with his 11-year-old grandson, who lives in South Africa and speaks about the Holocaust to his classmates. “He called and said, ‘Grandpa, I want to know about your past,’ so I sent him my book.” Kapilevich has written three books about his life, including “Survivor,” which he wrote in Russian and had translated into English.
JFS Silicon Valley CEO Susan Frazer can’t emphasize enough the responsibility the Jewish community has to these very elderly survivors of the Holocaust living in our midst.
“We have so many survivors still around,and it’s so hard to raise money for them,” she told J. “It’s unfathomable to me.”