A New Dramatic Series Tells the Incredible Story of Jewish Courage in Stalinist Russia

A Jewish father dresses his 7 year old son for his first day at public school. His wife enters, sees what he is doing, and begs him to stop. She tells him that the neighbor’s children who went to Soviet schools came back fully brain-washed – spouting atheist and communist dogma. But the father tells her they have no choice. If they don’t send their child to public school he will be taken from them and placed in a Soviet orphanage.

This scene is from the new Iron Sky series based on true stories of Jewish life in Soviet Russia. The series tells the incredible story of a handful of courageous Jews, who practiced and taught Judaism in secret, despite enormous danger and constant harassment, in Communist Russia in the late 1940s.

Between January and March 2021, weekly installments of the program were broadcast every Motzai Shabbat on two popular Hebrew websites. Altogether the series garnered over a million views. English subtitles have now been added giving an international audience the chance to watch this unique show.

The saga of the Jews under Russian Communism began in 1917. It was then that Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the Czarist government and instituted a Communist regime. From that point on, the three million Jews living in the Soviet Union were forbidden to publicly practice their religion. Anyone teaching it was condemned as an “enemy of the state”, arrested by the police and sent to the Gulag. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were also murdered by the regime, including many rabbis and observant Jews.

At Iron Sky’s opening, a generation has passed since the government has closed the synagogues and forbidden the teaching of Judaism. Once proudly Torah observant, all of Russian Jewry is now in danger of being lost to assimilation. Communist police hunt down rabbis. Jews spy on fellow Jews. And only one in a thousand is still Shabbos observant. To keep Yiddishkeit alive, three observant friends  join forces to open a secret cheder in the cellar of a building in the Russian town of Kazan. But they are savagely pursued by the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB) and the Yevsektkzia – a fanatically anti-Jewish secularist organization.

The series was produced and directed by filmmaker Yehezkel Laing in conjunction with the Israeli film school Torat Hayim.  Laing studied acting in Nissan Nativ, a secular Israeli acting school and also at the Maaleh Religious Film School, under actor/singer Shuli Rand. A baal teshuva from Canada, he lives today in Jerusalem where he writes, directs, and acts in Jewish content plays and films.

During the upcoming months, Iron Sky will be broadcast every Motzai Shabbat on VIN and Yeshivaworld, starting January 1st, 2022.