“Rain in Her Eyes” Film and Post Film Discussion with the director Ron Omer

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation, is honored to welcome filmmaker and son of Dvora Omer, Ron Omer to this post screening discussion.
Generously sponsored by Dr. Daryl Miller “in honor of Dr. Zipora (Tsipy) Gur, Founder and Executive Director of Classrooms Without Borders for her brilliant online programs.”
This is the story of author Dvora Omer, whose works touched generations of young people.

The Kibbutz Maoz Chaim children’s house. 1943. A gunshot echoes, followed by silence. Pretty 11-year-old Dvora, the kibbutz’s first child, is orphaned: Her mother is discovered with a bullet in her head. The word “suicide” is whispered around the kibbutz. Some say her mother’s second husband (Shmulik Lifshitz) was “a man of more than one woman”. Dvora is terribly upset: How could her mother leave her all alone in the world?At the same time her father, Moshe Mosenzon, is far-off in Europe, in the ranks of the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. He doesn’t rush home to his daughter. “The children orphaned by the Holocaust need me more,” he writes to her in a letter. It will be two and a half years until he returns.

11-year-old Dvora is all alone. Her biggest fear is of being sent to an orphanage.

Only at the age of 35 did Dvora Omer discover exactly what happened to her mother. While doing research for her book, “Sara, Heroine of Nili”, she met with an investigator specializing in locating missing people. She tells him about the question that has troubled her all these years and he promises to look into it. A few weeks later, Dvora is summoned to his office, where she learns the painful truth.

Her childhood trauma shapes her adult life – as mother, mate and children’s author. Through the heroes in her books, she returns again and again to her childhood experience of being alone in the world.

Dvora Omer wrote nearly one hundred books and earned a central place in Israeli culture. Generations of young people grew up on her writing. Who hasn’t read “My Father’s Eldest Son”, “Sara, Heroine of Nili”, “Love unto Death”, “I’ll Get Over It”, “Diving Ahead”, and so many more? Ron, Dvora’s son, a film editor, sets off on a journey to his mother’s painful past and the sources of her creations.

Ron Omer
Ron Omer, son of Dvora Omer, is the editor of feature films and documentaries. Among his work: “Bethlehem”, “Mister Gaga”, “Someone to Run With”, “Timrot Ashan”, “Then came the baby”, “Who will love me now?” And more. He is the winner of two awards from the Israeli Academy of Film and TV. This film about his mother is his first directorial work.