The Holocaust -surviving Rita Zohar brings the living history to Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut

JTA – When Rita Zohar joined the role of Bessie Stern, a Holocaust survivor, whose death of Scarlett Johansson’s new film sets “Eleanor the Great”, she didn’t just play.

The 81 -year -old Zohar is a survivor of the Holocaust childhood. She also relyed on her lived experience with loss and resilience to bring life to her character.

“This role in this film gave me a voice,” Zohar told the Jewish telegraphic agency. “Even if this is not my story, this is not what happened to me or my family, but that I verbalized it with Bessie, and I became Bessie in the film.”

“Eleanor the Great”, Johansson’s directorial debut, plays the 95-year-old Jewish actress June Squibb when she is looking for a connection in New York City after the death of her best friend Bess. Eleanor Morgenstein, Squibbs character, follows a self -help group for Holocaust -survivors in the local Jewish community center.

When Morggenstein says of the members of the group to share their history, he tells Bessies story as her own, who arranges Zohar in her own words.

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“At some point they asked them, and they press them under pressure to tell their story and without lying, she tells the story as if it were,” Zohar told her. “And what happens in the film is that it begins the first sentence, and then I appear and tell the story.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ6L2UE-KA

According to Tory Kamen, this election was intended for the script. In an interview with Hey Alma, Kamen said that the figure Bessie was named after her grandmother’s best friend in Florida, who is a Holocaust survivor.

“Another thing that was important to me was that we never really saw Eleanor Bessies story. I wanted it to come from Bessies’s mouth. This story should only be told by Bess,” said Kamen. “And Rita Zohar, who plays Bessie, is a Holocaust even more surviving and does an incredible job.”

Morgenstein’s story repeats others who have also incorrectly presented themselves as survivors. In 2016, a man from Pennsylvania apologized publicly after he had spoken, who claimed to have survived Auschwitz, and in 2019 a German historian was prompted to produce a family history of suffering in the Holocaust.

Jessica Hecht, left, June Squibb and Scarlett Johansson take the special screening of ‘Eleanor the Great’, which are organized by Sony Pictures Classics and The Cinema Society in Village East by Angelika on September 24, 2025 in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Later in the film, Morggenstein’s story is taken up by Erin Kellyman’s young journalism student, whose father, to learn more about her history, to be able to reveal her dishonesty.

For Johansson, who broke out in tears in the PBS show “Finding Your Roots” in 2017 after learning that her family had died in the Warsaw Ghetto, the film had a special response.

“A large part of my family history was lost and only many years later I was able to contact my family heritage,” said Johansson in an interview with the red carpet at the Toronto Film Festival. “For this reason, this story is really a resonance for me. The stories of these survivors are lost, there are organizations such as Shoah who document them for future generations, and their work is so important. I hope that this film really encourages people to ask questions from their relatives and to keep their stories alive.”

Scarlett Johansson on the set of “Eleanor the Great” with June Squibb. (Anne Joyce/ Sony Pictures Classics about JTA)

Johansson worked with the USC Shoah Foundation and the Rodeph Pholom Congregation, a reform synagogue in Manhattan, to ensure that real Holocaust survivors were presented in the film.

This decision also led to Zohar’s casting, which was born in a concentration camp in Ukraine in 1944, where she was hidden under one window in a gap between two walls during her childhood.

“When the Russians came and freed the camp, I was 4 and 1/2 months old at that time, and my life probably saved that because I could no longer survive,” said Zohar.

While the majority of her family was murdered, Zohar survived with her mother and grandmother. After the war, the remaining family emigrated from Zohar to Romania, where they lived until she and her mother moved to Israel in the 1950s.

“When you arrive to Israel, it is like having discovered the sun for the first time,” said Zohar. “It was our sun, it was our country, and the whole country was at that time so that we were so high together.”

(LR) Erin Kellyman, June Squibb, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Scarlett Johansson on September 11, 2025 in New York City) in the film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater in New York City).

At the age of 14, Zohar started touring around the world with her mother in Israel’s Yiddish theater before finally playing in Hollywood in Hollywood in the 1980s. Later she returned to Israel, where she played the leading role in several critically recognized films with “Laura Adlers Last Love Affair” and “Mrs. Moskowitz and The Cats”.

For Zohar, while some critics of “Eleanor the Great” have resorted to the false Holocaust narrative of the film, she believes that the film is concerned with a long tradition of the Jews that empathize with the persecution of their ancestors and that for Squibbs character “it is as if it was there”.

“They talk about Eleanor who tell a lie, and I look at them a little differently, because when we celebrate the Passahpahfest or one of the Jewish holidays, and we talk about history and slaves, we always say it as if we were there,” said Zohar.

When the remaining Holocaust survivor decreases heavily, Zohar said that it continued to contribute to the Holocaust storytelling.

“It is extremely important because you have to look at the age,” said Zohar. “I mean there will be a time when there will be no survivors and who will tell our story?”