The B’nei Menashe, who live in the northeastern Indian province of Manipur, have been recognized by the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel as the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The world’s only substantial group of practicing East Asian Jews, the B’nei Menashe came by way of China to live along the India-Myanmar border, hundreds of miles from any major city, and even farther from their nearest Jewish neighbors.

In the film, three Chicagoans travel to this remote area to bring the B’nei Menashe their first Torah scroll. One of them was Sabra Minkus, a producer of the documentary, who will be at the screening and will take part in a discussion after the film.

The event is cosponsored by the Northwest Division of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona and the Sun City Havurah. For more information, contact Anne Lowe at 577-9393, ext. 130 or alowe@jfsa.org.

Susan Kovitz (left) and Susan Claassen rehearse ‘Look Ma, We’re Dancing,’ premiering at The Invisible Theatre. (Tim Fuller)

The Invisible Theatre will stage the world premiere of Janet Neipris’ “Look Ma, We’re Dancing,” a lighthearted comedy about two grown sisters who are still competing for the approval and attention of their long dead mother.

The show will run Feb. 8-26, with a preview performance Feb. 7.

“Janet is a playwright that we have nurtured over 30 years,” says IT Managing Artistic Director Susan Claassen, who notes that IT was founded as a new playwright’s theater. Neipris’ plays have been produced at major theatres worldwide and won her many awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. As chair of graduate playwriting and screenwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she has taught many of today’s leading playwrights and screenwriters.

Although the characters in “Look Ma” are clearly Jewish — at one point they light a yahrzeit candle —“it’s an interesting universal story,” emphasizes Claassen, who plays one of the sisters, Vi, opposite Susan Kovitz’s Franny. Rounding out the cast are James Blair (Max), Bri Giger (Sophie) and Burney Starks (Avery).

To purchase tickets or for information, call 882-9721, visit the box office at 1400 N. First Ave. at Drachman, or go to invisibletheatre.com and click on the Ovationtix logo.

Vered Otmy

Four Israeli artists will spend almost two weeks in Tucson next month, giving workshops and talking about their experiences as artists living in Israel.

“This amazing ‘partnership 2gether’ project, sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish Federations of North America and our local TIPS (Tucson, Israel, Phoenix, Seattle) committee, helps bring people from Israel and Tucson together,” says Guy Gelbart, director of the Weintraub Israel Center. “It fosters our sense of peoplehood and mutual responsibility by creating real friendships and deeper cultural connections. This human touch, the real faces and real people relationship, is what makes this visit so exciting.”

The artists will work with groups from various organizations, including Tucson Hebrew Academy, Handmaker Jewish Services for the Aging and Howenstine Magnet High School. They also will be the special guests at the Israel Center’s “Tu B’Shevat Arty Party” on Thursday, Feb. 9, from 5-6:30 p.m. at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, where they will teach crafts for children.

Vered Otmy, who has lived on Moshav Geha for the last 23 years, specializes in

papier-maché. Her works have been displayed in Tel Aviv, London, New York and Chicago and most recently in Belgium and France.

Saraleh Haitman also lives on Moshav Geha and studied art at the Oranim Kibbutz Seminar. She works in ceramics, paint, jewelry and sculpture, and has taught art, communications and film at Israeli schools and colleges.

Yehudit Orinsky, from Moshav Kochav Michael, is originally from Minneapolis. After volunteering on a kibbutz, she made aliyah 40 years ago. Orinsky studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her specialty is mosaics. She has taught adults and children and also trains art teachers.

Ada Bouganim

Ada Bouganim, who has lived in Nitzan Aleph for the last 13 years, grew up in Kibbutz Yavne. She has travelled through Asia and Australia and lived for a short while in Los Angeles, where she worked as an interior designer. She now designs events and helps participants design and construct props and decorations.

The Tu B’Shevat Arty Party, cosponsored by Tucson Hebrew Academy, will be held in the JCC’s Heritage Room and Sculpture Garden. Admission is $5 per child under 12. For more information about the artists’ visit, contact. Jennifer Ferrell at 577-9393, ext. 133 or IsraelCen ter@jfsa.org.

One made the cut of five finalists, but a Cedar film has yet to capture a golden statuette. In fact, no Israeli film has ever won an Oscar.

Cedar and many of his countrymen are hoping that his fourth entry, “Footnote,” will prove to be the charm when nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced on Jan. 24.

Last year was the first in memory that no domestic or foreign film dealing with the Holocaust or the Nazi era was entered in any Oscars category. On that basis, I predicted that the “Schindler’s List” and “Inglourious Basterds” era had passed and that the historical genre would deal with more recent conflicts and genocides.

It took only a year to prove the prophecy wrong with Poland’s entry this year, “In Darkness.” The movie’s settings and emotions are as lightless as the underground sewers of Lvov, where a dozen Jewish men, women and children hid for 14 months during the German occupation of Poland. Their unlikely protector was a rough-hewn Polish sewage worker and part-time thief who knew all the hiding places in the underground system — it’s where he worked and stashed his loot.

At the helm of “In Darkness” is the superb Polish director Agnieszka Holland (“Europa, Europa”), whose forte is to delineate the shades of the human character. As in her other works, the strengths and weakness of the victims, heroes, villains and bystanders vary with time and circumstance.

“I have always been intrigued by the contradictions and extremes in human nature,” she said in a phone interview. “I wonder at how fragile and how strong we are, how evil and irrational under some conditions, and how brave and compassionate at other times.”

With “Footnote,” Cedar centers on the rivalry between two Talmudic scholars who also are father and son. It’s a sharp contrast from the New York native’s previous film, “Beaufort,” a war film with an anti-war message.

“What could be more boring?” I can hear a younger audience moan about “Footnote.” But in the hands of Cedar, 43, the film has more tension per frame than a gun-toting action picture or apocalyptic sci-fi epic.

Both Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, father and son, are shining lights in the Department of Talmudic Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where rivalries are fierce. To the two Shkolnik philologists, the stakes in their lifelong studies of the authenticity and meaning of each word in different Talmudic versions and editions are far higher than the struggles of warring countries or the rise and fall of national economies.

The director, himself the son of renowned Hebrew University biochemist Howard Cedar, firmly rejects the assumption that the protagonists resemble his family or their relationships.

“The film’s Talmudists in no way represent my father and myself,” said the younger Cedar, who as an Orthodox Jew is a rarity among Tel Aviv filmmakers. “Actually, their relationship is my nightmare, not my reality.”

Yet “Footnote” explores the balance between uncompromising honesty and family relationships.

“What if my son becomes a more successful director than I am, but makes movies that I hate?” asks Cedar, who explored the gulf between observant and secular Israelis in his first two films, “In Time of Favor” and “Campfire.” “Will I tell him how I really feel or preserve family harmony?”

On a national scale, the insistence on one’s absolute truth contributes to civic violence in Israel, Cedar believes. “We now have a generation that considers ‘compromise’ a bad word, and social harmony has been taken hostage by people who claim to know the absolute truth,” he said.

Although “Footnote” has not yet been released in American theaters, it has received favorable reviews. At the Cannes Film Festival, “Footnote” was awarded the top prize for best screenplay, and in the United States the National Board of Reviews of Motion Pictures placed the film among the five top foreign-language features.

But the Oscar competition in the foreign-language category is rough and the Academy Awards selection committee is widely considered unpredictable, if not erratic.

The Netherlands’ entry, “Sonny Boy,” tells the actual story of two unlikely rescuers, a middle-aged Dutch housewife who runs off with and marries a black Surinamese student more than 20 years her junior. Under the German occupation they hide several Jews in their home. Similar to Anne Frank’s fate, the couple is betrayed and arrested, and they die in captivity.

One trend among foreign film producers is the growing emphasis on such themes as internal conflicts, problems of immigrants and life under the former Soviet occupation of Eastern European countries. Examples are films from Bosnia and Ireland (ethnic cleansing), Colombia (guerrillas vs. the military), the Czech Republic (expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II), Estonia (Soviet army deserter returns), Kazakhstan (Soviets invade Afghanistan), Italy and Romania (illegal immigrants) and Lebanon (Christian-Muslim conflict).

While many colonials this side of the Atlantic consider the King’s English as a foreign language, this year the United Kingdom actually submitted an entry in the foreign-language category. The film “Patagonia” is set in a Welsh settlement in southern Argentina, and the characters speak Welsh and Spanish.

In both the United States and Europe, the critical favorite is the Iranian entry, “A Separation,” which has won a string of awards at international film festivals.

The film by Asghar Farhadi masterfully combines an easily recognizable situation — an impending divorce in an upper-middle-class family — with the strange atmosphere, pieties and judicial proceedings of an unfamiliar society.

The Oscars will be presented Feb. 26.

Israel’s hope for its first Oscar was kept alive with Joseph Cedar’s “Footnote,” listed among the five finalists in the foreign-language film category. The story of the rivalry between two Talmudic scholars, who are also father and son, marks the second Oscar nod for Cedar following “Beaufort” in 2007.

The toughest competition for Israel will likely come from Iran’s entry, “A Separation, which won the Golden Globe earlier this month,” and the Polish film “In Darkness.” Agnieszka Holland (“Europa, Europa”), whose Jewish father was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto and whose non-Jewish mother fought in the ghetto’s uprising and was a member of the Polish Underground, tells the true-life story of a dozen Jewish men, women and children who hid in the underground sewers of Lvov for 14 months during the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Allen was tapped for best director and best original screenplay for “Midnight in Paris,” which also was nominated for best picture along with Spielberg’s epic World War I movie “War Horse.” However, Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin,” which won a Golden Globe, surprisingly did not qualify in the best animated film competition.

Aaron Sorkin (with Steven Zailian) was nominated for best adapted screenplay for “Moneyball.” Jonah Hill, was the surprise hit of the film after graduating from his shaggy boy roles in “Superbad” and “Cyrus,” was nominated in the best supporting actor category.

Oscar winners will be crowned Feb. 26 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

When I read about young Jewish immigrant authors from the former Soviet Union, I become conscious of my privileges as a native-born American. But when I read interviews with certain American-born Jewish writers my age, I become aware of my closeness to the immigrant experience. And when I hear these writers talk about how anti-Semitism is irrelevant to “our generation,” I am astonished. When I moved from Brooklyn at the age of nine to a non-Jewish suburb, I discovered country clubs, dancing lessons — and the fact that they excluded me as a Jew.

But these issues don’t get to the heart of the thinking that separates me most from my ostensible peers. That heart is Israel.

In a 2009 Forward column titled “How I’m Losing My Love for Israel,” author Jay Michaelson reported, “It has become simply exhausting. . . . My love of Israel has turned into a series of equivocations,” like, “’I do not support the expansion of settlements, but the Palestinians bear primary responsibility for the collapse of the peace process in 1999.’” Michaelson went on: “I admit that my exhaustion is exacerbated because, in my social circles, supporting Israel is like supporting segregation.” But, he explained, “I don’t think advocates of Israel understand exactly how bad the situation is . . . in liberal or leftist social-political circles.”

I have more than a passing acquaintance with Michaelson’s “liberal or leftist social-political circles.” He is right. The situation there is bad. As open-minded as these “circles” claim to be, they are as quick as their analogues at the other end of the spectrum to judge and scorn. Like Jay Michaelson, I find it exhausting.

But unlike Michaelson, when forced to choose sides, I choose Israel. Unfortunately, for me, choosing Israel often means the opposite of engaging. Because I cannot find a juste milieu, I bow out. I exit.

In 2006 I resigned from the National Book Critics Circle, whose blog had become a mouthpiece for criticizing Israel. In 2009 I unsubscribed from a women’s poetry listserv because it had become a reliable source of condemnation for Operation Cast Lead. I made my choices after speaking up—and receiving abuse online and off. Rarely, another writer defended me. Slightly more often, I received appreciative private emails.

It wasn’t enough. It still isn’t.

These days, my objections are even quieter — for example, unfollowing writers whose Tweets and Facebook posts keep condemning Israel for enforcing the Gaza blockade (which even the UN deems legal). Recently I declined to join the writers, many Jewish, who signed an “Occupy Writers” manifesto supporting “the Occupy movement around the world” — a movement that may include more episodes like “Occupy Boston Occupies the Israeli Consulate.”

And too many Jewish writers go out of their way to broadcast their criticisms. There was a time this year when you could barely avoid pieces like Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” or Kiera Feldman’s “The Romance of Birthright Israel.” Gil Troy described these essays in the Jerusalem Post as resembling 17th-century “captivity narratives:” After being “force-fed diets of Zionist folk tunes” and “hunkalicious Israeli soldiers,” the writers “courageously flee their brainwashing . . . rejecting Israel while embracing Palestinians, about whom they claim they never were taught.”

But most of my literary acquaintances haven’t read Gil Troy: They consider the Jerusalem Post more “biased” than, say, The Nation, where Feldman’s piece appeared. To suggest that the Jerusalem Post or Commentary merits attention is like recommending Fox News over MSNBC. (But it doesn’t help when Commentary’s chief literary blogger derides the Occupy Writers petition as a “useful list of useful idiots.”)

I know Israel isn’t perfect. I will listen to criticisms arising from a sincere concern for Israel’s health and security. I pause whenever journalist Jeffrey Goldberg criticizes misguided Israeli policy; he writes about Israel with all his heart, soul, and might.

I wish I could do the same. My responses might not remain so visceral. I wouldn’t have to resign and unsubscribe so often. Since I am too old for most programs that provide Israel advocacy training, I was delighted to hear that a version of Write On for Israel would be offered for older writers — then disappointed to learn it would be delayed.

But I’ll keep looking. There has to be a place between the diatribes on the National Book Critics Circle blog and the sometimes equally inflammatory responses from the other end of the spectrum. There has to be a juste milieu.

(This article was first published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with permission.)

That, at any rate, was the buzz in scholarly circles when reports began surfacing last month that an exceptionally rare collection of ancient Judaic manuscripts — some of them dating back more than a millennia — were discovered in a cave in Samangan province in northeastern Afghanistan.

The manuscripts are of several varieties, both religious and secular, and are drafted in a number of languages, including Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Arabic. Among the documents recovered are fragments of the writings of the Saadia Gaon, a famed Jewish sage born in Egypt in the ninth century, and financial records that may shed light on the little-known medieval Jewish merchant class known as the Raddanites.

But those who have seen the documents, and who are familiar with the shadowy trade in Middle Eastern antiquities, say the fantastic tales of an unsuspecting shepherd happening upon documents of incalculable historic value are not to be believed.

“Generally, you have to be very careful of what a Middle Eastern antiquities dealer tells you,” said Lenny Wolfe, himself a Middle Eastern antiquities dealer based in Jerusalem. “You’re probably safer not believing it.”

What no one disputes is that the documents are authentic and, if they can be made widely available to scholars, can potentially shed light on a period in Jewish history that remains shrouded in mystery.

The documents, which number about 150 — far fewer than the thousands in the Cairo Geniza — are generally believed to be about 1,000 years old, though a few are probably older. They include early texts suggesting the community may have been Karaite, a Jewish sect that rejected rabbinic law and flourished in the 10th and 11th centuries. There are also financial documents that may have much to teach about the Jewish merchants who acted as middlemen along the trade routes between East Asia and Europe. The writings of Saadia Gaon include fragments of a biblical commentary and a rebuttal to the claims of a local heretic. Poems also were recovered.

“I think that it’s a very important find,” said Shaul Shaked, an emeritus professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who saw some of the documents in London several months ago. “This is the first time that we have a large quantity of handwritten documents from that area, from Afghanistan, where we knew vaguely there was some kind of Jewish settlement, a Jewish community, but we had very vague ideas about what their life was like.”

Wolfe told JTA that he had the opportunity to purchase a small portion of the documents recently and is holding them in Jerusalem until a national institution can come up with the money to acquire them. He declined to say how much he paid for them, where he got them or how much it would cost to deliver them to a museum.

In all probability, the manuscripts were illegally smuggled out of Afghanistan. The director of the Afghan National Archives told Reuters that the find was not Afghan, but a Culture Ministry adviser conceded that it’s not uncommon for local antiquities to be shipped abroad where they fetch much higher prices.

As a result, efforts to determine who now holds the documents, where they are being stored or how they were acquired proved to be inconclusive.

What is clear is that the collection is split between several private dealers, at least one of whom is based in London. Other lots are said to be in the hands of dealers in Dubai and Switzerland. Other than Wolfe’s acknowledgement of his holdings, JTA could not confirm claims regarding who has ownership of the documents or how they were acquired.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of colorful stories floating around. One story, which several of those involved had heard, involves a Russian-Jewish billionaire who supposedly had expressed interest in purchasing the manuscripts but had pulled out after his attorneys advised that he may run into legal difficulties. No one would divulge his name.

It “adds an element of mystique,” Wolfe said. “I personally never spoke to any Russian oligarch. What I’ve heard is hearsay. I don’t trust hearsay.”

Menashe Goldelman, a London-based expert in Middle Eastern antiquities who has authored a 23-page report on the documents, told JTA that they emerged on the London market several months ago. Goldelman said he had been enlisted by a dealer to sell the documents on his behalf. At present, Goldelman said he was trying to broker an agreement with the various dealers to bring the collection together. Goldelman estimates their total value at about $5 million.

“They are not things that are stolen from an institution or found in a legal excavation,” Goldelman said. “At some point, everything that comes from the ground goes to the black market. The black market, this is the institution that helps to save this material. If something has, let’s say, commercial value, it gets saved. If you don’t have a commercial value for the manuscript, they go and put it in the fireplace.”

Goldelman’s involvement may not reassure skittish buyers about their provenance. In 2010, two professors reportedly accused him of trafficking in stolen antiquities and protested his scheduled appearance at a conference in Israel. Goldelman’s lawyer denied the accusations and threatened to sue for libel.

None of the experts who have spoken publicly on the matter of the Afghan documents appeared to be too troubled by unanswered questions about their origins, seeming to accept such things as the cost of doing business in ancient artifacts.

“What is important for us is that these fragments and documents don’t get buried again in some safe of a collector,” said Haggai Ben-Shammai, a professor of Arabic at Hebrew University and the academic director of Israel’s National Library. Ben-Shammai said the library was searching for a donor who would acquire the manuscripts on its behalf.

“We don’t have the means to acquire them on our own,” Ben-Shammai said. “We need some assistance in this.”

But after Canyons, the state’s largest ski resort, opened the nation’s first ski-area, glatt kosher restaurant this season, the Jews came. And ate. And they were satisfied.

“Response has been phenomenal,” said executive chef John Murcko, who is the vice president of food and beverage at Talisker Corp., which bought Canyons in 2008 and opened the kosher Bistro at Canyons last December.

“We were at 100 percent capacity from the day we opened through the New Year’s Day weekend,” he said. “Word of mouth has been tremendous. Locals are discovering us as well, not just our destination visitors.”

The restaurant has brought more than kosher dining to the resort town of Park City, but also an eruv and weekly Shabbat services – at least for the ski season. The town already had a year-round Reform synagogue, Temple Har Shalom.

Murcko, who was named by Salt Lake Magazine last year as the Best Chef in Utah, said the idea of opening up a kosher restaurant was to stand out.

“Talisker has always sought to create the finest dining and hospitality experiences – and differentiate ourselves from our competition,” he told JTA. “We knew that individuals and families that keep kosher would enjoy a gourmet bistro in Park City, and that locals who love fine bistro-style dining would, too. We started planning it months ago, and we are very pleased how it has come together.”

Murcko traveled to New York to learn kosher cooking, while chef Zeke Wray spent time in Toronto and Los Angeles.

The cuisine is categorized as “New American Kosher Bistro.” Breakfast takes a minimalist approach: bagels and cream cheese, granola, fruit and yogurt for $16. Lunch options are comprised largely of salads and sandwiches, including a kosher Reuben, grilled chicken salad and Israeli couscous on pita.

It’s at dinner that Bistro really cuts loose, starting with the appetizers, including vegetarian chopped liver and seared ahi tuna. There also are plenty of soups – a nice way to end a day on the slopes – but you won’t find chicken with matzah balls. If the soup isn’t enough to keep you warm, the main courses will, from the smoked duck breast with ragu of braised red cabbage, fennel, apple and duck confit to ribeye steaks accompanied by roasted squash, sage white bean puree, leeks and warm smoked cherry tomatoes. The menu also features an array of lamb, pasta and fish dishes — or pastrami sandwiches for those so inclined.

Those looking for Jewish-style cooking should be sure to come on Shabbat. The $85 prix fixe, five-course Friday night dinner includes gefilte fish, chicken noodle soup (still no matzah balls) and a choice of turkey involtini, standing rib roast or chicken schnitzel all served with potato kugel on the side. The $65 Shabbat lunch is six courses built around a hearty flanken cholent.

The Bistro’s COR kashrut certification comes from the Kashruth Council of Canada, the largest kosher certification agency north of the border. COR certifies more than 1,000 facilities and thousands more products.

COR Rabbi Tsvi Heber oversees Bistro, and two New York-based rabbis, Yosef Kirszenberg and Mendel Wilmovsky, serve as the on-site authorities.

Kirszenberg, 46 and originally from Argentina, has been coming to Utah from New York for the last two years to run programs at Canyons. Since the restaurant opened, he has been spending 2 1/2 weeks out of every month in Utah overseeing the Canyons’ kosher dining, examining the 3-mile-long eruv that encompasses the resort hotel area every Friday and leading Shabbat services.

“We have a beautiful shul — it was built especially to be a shul — in the same building as the restaurant,” Kirszenberg said, adding that Canyons has had a minyan every week since the restaurant opened.

Kirszenberg, who is a Lubavitcher, now leaves his wife and nine children, aged 1 to 21, at home in New York when he comes to Utah to work, but he says he hopes to be able to move with them to Utah sometime in the future.

And what about skiing?

“Not yet, but everyone is pushing me to do it,” he said. “The last time was when I was 9 years old in Argentina.”

This week, crowds of people will be flocking several times a day to Temple Har Shalom in this picturesque ski town, but they won’t be coming for Shacharit, Mincha or Maariv services.

Instead, for 10 days the synagogue is serving as one of the venues of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, with five screenings daily through Jan. 29.

It’s the fourth consecutive year that Har Shalom has become the “Temple Theatre” — one of the many elements that makes this Reform synagogue unusual.

Another is that Har Shalom is probably the only shul in the world with ski-in/ski-out services.

“At Har Shalom, Hebrew school is on Wednesdays; Sundays are for skiing,” says Ed Barbanell, who works at the University of Utah and has two sons in the Hebrew school.

On Friday afternoons during ski season, the synagogue holds a Kabbalat Shabbat service at the Sunset Cabin in Deer Valley, one of three ski mountains in Park City. The other two are Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons, which this winter opened the nation’s first glatt kosher restaurant at a ski resort.

“I am someone who spent about four seconds of his life thinking about Shabbat, but if I’m on the mountain, I’m there,” Jack Amiel, a Hollywood screenwriter and former resident of Los Angeles, said of the Kabbalat Shabbat services.

“You get people from Switzerland and France and New York and Pennsylvania,” he said. “You sing, you dance, you pound the floor to keep the beat with your ski boots. It’s fantastic.”

Until 1995, Park City had no synagogue. That year, a group of Jews took out an ad in a local newspaper declaring that “The time has come!”

It took another decade to build up enough momentum to begin construction. In the interim, the community grew and Seagram’s fortune scion Adam Bronfman, a well-known Jewish philanthropist who has a home here, donated the money to hire a full-time rabbi. Bronfman’s gift had a couple of conditions attached: The rabbi had to be willing to perform interfaith weddings and embrace interfaith families, and he had to be able to play guitar and ski.

Rabbi Joshua Aaronson was hired in 2002, and since then the synagogue’s membership has tripled. Among its members are many well-off Jews who have bought ski homes here and stayed for the high quality of life.

Nancy Gilbert, who serves on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and owns a company in Boca Raton, Fla., that organizes trips to Israel, took her first ski vacation here in 2003 after seeing Park City host the Winter Olympics in 2002. Within weeks, she and her husband, Mark, an investment banker and major Democratic donor — they hosted Joe Biden for a fundraiser at their Florida home in 2009 and Michelle Obama at their Park City house in 2011 — decided to buy property and build a second home here.

Gilbert credits Aaronson with transforming the Jewish community in Park City.

“He’s a mover and shaker,” she said, calling him a perfect fit for this “small community with a big vision.”

A few years after he came to Park City, before the synagogue construction was complete, the rabbi asked Sundance Film Festival organizers if they were interested in using the temple as a venue. Once an agreement was in place, several Sundance-specific elements were incorporated into the social hall, such as high-end speakers and heavy curtains to block out light.

Designed by the German-Jewish architect Alfred Jacoby, the synagogue features blue-and-white, stained-glass window in the sanctuary by Japanese-American ceramic artist Jun Kaneko. Kaneko was recruited by congregant Josh Kanter, a past chairman of the International Sculpture Center. Kanter considers the result to be “a central component of Utah’s public art collection.”

The collaboration between the synagogue and Sundance has worked out well for both sides, the rabbi says.

“Our values are aligned,” Aaronson said. “Sundance is interested in intellectual freedom and helping make the world a better place through film. We’re interested in the same things through Jewish values.”

Temple president Doug Goldsmith, a fourth-generation Utahan, credits Aaronson for his children’s decision to undergo bar and bat mitzvahs — and for making Har Shalom welcoming to people like his wife, who is not Jewish.

“Non-Jews have been on the board and on the pulpit carrying the Torah and nobody blinks,” he said. “There is total acceptance for families who choose to live a Jewish lifestyle.”

The emergence of the local Jewish community has coincided with increased involvement in Sundance by individual congregants.

“Shabbat at Sundance,” an invitation-only Friday night dinner and Kabbalat Shabbat held as an official Sundance event, was the brainchild of Shari Levitin, a California native who moved to Park City 20 years ago as a senior vice president for Marriott. Levitin’s deepening involvement in Har Shalom coincided with her joining the Sundance Institute’s Utah Advisory Board. She hosted the first Shabbat at Sundance events at her home in 2008 and 2009 as a way of introducing the festival’s leaders to Har Shalom’s machers.

“It was a smashing success,” Shari says, with many more local Jews now involved in the Sundance Patron Circle and Utah Advisory Board.

Goldsmith says the greatest benefit of Har Shalom’s collaboration with Sundance is getting people from all over the world into the shul.

“Having people literally from all over the world being able to enjoy the incredible temple we were able to build really demystifies what’s in a synagogue,” he said. “They come in, they feel at home. It’s a great thing for us to do to be fully engaged in Park City.”

This year, on the last day of Sundance, the Temple Theatre will be turned back over to Har Shalom for a synagogue fundraiser featuring the first screening of Amiel’s new film, “Big Miracle” starring Drew Barrymore, five days before it opens nationally.

Alex Dunai, second from right, has become a leading purveyor of Jewish heritage tourism in Ukraine. (Alex Weisler)

LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) – Alex Dunai is not Jewish. But over 15 years of leading Jewish tourists searching for their roots in Ukraine, he’s built up a serviceable knowledge of Yiddish — though sometimes he has to make things up.

“I make up sayings — you have highway roads, we have ‘oy vey’ roads,” Dunai said. “If it’s something funny and unusual, that’s always Yiddish. It’s an amazing language, one-of-a-kind.”

A burly man with an easy laugh, Dunai lives in Lviv, Ukraine’s fourth largest city. Over the years, the 43-year-old has built a profitable career as a researcher and tour guide, escorting Jews through Ukrainian shtetls in their search for information about departed relatives. He has provided services to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

In 2006, his reputation was cemented by Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the best-seller “The Lost,” a memoir of his attempts to ascertain the fate of six relatives killed in western Ukraine during the Holocaust. Mendelsohn, who relied extensively on Dunai for research and other assistance, refers to him in the book as his “right-hand man.”

“He has a rigorous historical background; he has the smooth savvy; he knows how to work with archivists, and is especially good at knowing how to avoid time-wasting distractions,” Mendelsohn wrote in an email. “More than anything, perhaps, he’s incredibly canny about how to deal with local people.”

Along with Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated,” Mendelsohn’s book helped put a spotlight on the growing phenomenon of Ukrainian heritage tourism, the lucrative industry of American Jews trekking back to the old country to explore their roots.

For visiting Jews, Dunai has become a sought-after resource. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, he said, the traffic has been staggering.

“The 20th century was an intense period of looking into the future,” he said. “And now, people are saying, ‘OK, we’re looking at the future, we’re flying to the moon, but we don’t know what our grandparents did, what was our background? Let’s look also into the past.’”

He got his start in guiding after graduating from the state university in Lviv with a degree in history. For a time Dunai worked for the government in a capacity he would not specify.

In 1994, an American genealogy group specializing in Galicia contacted him for help with research. Those requests led to shtetl excursions, and soon Dunai was spending much of his time driving foreigners to small villages in his father’s old Lada.

Eventually, he was so busy he had to decide whether to drop the side gig or devote himself full time to his new occupation. In retrospect, it was an easy choice.

“The more I was doing the research for other people in genealogy, the more I was uncovering for myself how much knowledge is missing about all this,” Dunai said. “People here are not aware about how different this world was before the war. It became so fascinating to me that I really decided I will take a risk. I don’t regret it.”

Dunai’s client load fluctuates, though he said he tends to lead more excursions in the summer and to focus more on research in the colder months. The work can sometimes be emotionally taxing.

“Sometimes people tell me stories that they wouldn’t tell others,” he said. “On the first trips, I was drained completely. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t do anything. I would come back and just lay on my bed speechless, and just be drained emotionally.”

It’s an image at odds with the Dunai of today, a gregarious, heavyset man with an easy sense of humor and speech peppered with excited exclamations and bits of wisdom.

“There are more good people than bad,” he explained at one point, “but the bad are better organized.”

Though Dunai enjoys guiding his clients, he said he’s growing too old for such frequent travel and may soon transition his work into a company providing tours of the Lviv area with “really intellectual and really deep” excursions focusing on places connected to literature and famous Ukrainians. But he said he’ll probably never fully give up guiding. He thrives on its spontaneity.

“I couldn’t be a bus driver, going on the same route. I enjoy that every time it’s interesting and unusual and diverse,” he said. “This really became my whole life. This is not just work for me. Even if I could earn a living somehow in a different way, I would do it for free.”