There Are Jews Here

Throughout the United States, approximately one million Jews live outside major urban centers. Focusing on four such vanishing communities, filmmakers Brad Lichtenstein and Morgan Elise Johnson demonstrate the unique challenges facing these far-flung congregations as they struggle to hold on, just barely, to a Jewish way of life. From the Rust Belt and Deep South–in Latrobe, Pennsylvania and Dothan, Alabama–to out West in Laredo, Texas and Butte, Montana, local synagogue leaders must contend with aging and dwindling membership, interfaith marriage, and financial hardships. Their urgent devotion to preservation of faith speaks uniquely to the American spirit, but conversely to a larger sense of demise and displacement occurring in small-town America. (Atlanta Jewish Film Festival)