The Passover Seder That Brought ‘Schindler’s List’ Actors Together

There are many stories from the “Schindler’s List” production that have surfaced over the years: Director Steven Spielberg had weekly Friday phone calls with his friend Robin Williams to cheer him up. He dispatched George Lucas to oversee post-production on “Jurassic Park” while he filmed in Europe. Local agitators painted swastikas near the filming locations in Kraków, Poland. Some Holocaust survivors on set trembled at the sight of Ralph Fiennes in full costume and in character as Amon Göth, the sadistic commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp.

But one of the lesser-known stories is of the Passover seder that took place about a month into the production. On April 5, 1993, Spielberg hosted a seder for the cast at a hotel in Kraków. It was attended by many Israeli actors, as well as the German actors who were portraying Nazis in the film.

Spielberg discussed the seder in an interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press (HFP) in 1993: “Everybody who plays a Nazi in ‘Schindler’s List’ is a German actor, except for one who was Polish, and we had an amazing experience in Poland, when all the German actors came to the Passover seder in Kraków. They put on yarmulkes, they sat there with prayer books, the Haggadahs, opened up before them, and the Israeli actors moved their chairs next to the German actors. It was never the same after that for me, it was all very good between us, some kind of closure happened that day and I wept, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t unusual because these are actors, they are people like us, but there was something symbolic about what they did in attending the Passover seder that really made me want to go to Germany and talk about the picture in person there to young Germans.”

“They put on yarmulkes, they sat there with prayer books, the Haggadahs, opened up before them, and the Israeli actors moved their chairs next to the German actors. It was never the same after that for me, it was all very good between us, some kind of closure happened that day and I wept.” – Steven Spielberg

In that same interview, Spielberg said that when he began filming, he was still carrying anger — especially when German actors, dressed in Nazi uniforms, approached him to make small talk between takes. “I was having trouble talking to them in those uniforms and I was angry,” Spielberg said. “But I never blamed a generation for a former generation. My parents never taught us that.”

Spielberg later described making “Schindler’s List” as the hardest filmmaking experience of his life. The film was shot largely on location in Poland, including scenes at Auschwitz. Two Israeli actors reportedly broke down after filming a scene simulating the experience of women entering a gas chamber. Other scenes were so intense that some crew members, including the focus puller, admitted they couldn’t bring themselves to look through the lens.

Spielberg also said that the war in the Balkans at the time loomed over the sentiments being portrayed in the production. “Nothing, no movie, no book, not even a presidential influence is going to stop what’s happening in Bosnia right now, it’s going to take an entire world effort to pull all these sides apart,” Spielberg told the HFP. “So, I had come to the end of my patience with the ethnic cleansing, that terrible word being used in Bosnia regarding certain atrocities and genocide, but I was at the end of my rope with the Holocaust deniers who in 1990 began to talk more. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, there were many more acts of violence from Neo-Nazi groups. So, I felt that this was the right time, even though it meant more work to overlap ‘Jurassic Park’ with ‘Schindler’s List,’ to have this picture come out now rather than wait another year, because things were happening.”

Australian author Thomas Keneally, whose 1982 Booker Prize–winning novel “Schindler’s Ark” became the basis for the film, recalled being particularly moved by the location of the Australian premiere. “I was most comfortable, of course, with the premieres in Australia — particularly the first, the Sydney premiere, to which Ben Kingsley came,” Keneally wrote in his 2007 book “Searching for Schindler: A Memoir.” “A press conference was held in the Sydney Jewish Museum, a regional museum of the highest quality. I was fascinated that it commemorated the first Passover seder in Australia, in 1788, when a Jewish Cockney girl convict named Esther Abrahams was given a special ration of wine and bread to enable the Jewish convicts to observe the holiday.”

Poldek Pfefferberg, the Beverly Hills leather goods dealer and Holocaust survivor who first told Keneally the Schindler story in the early 1980s, was also the person who convinced Keneally that the story had to be written — and eventually filmed.

In an interview about the 40th anniversary of “Schindler’s Ark” in 2022, Keneally told the Journal that Pfefferberg and his wife Mila were the first Holocaust survivors he had knowingly met. Since the publication of his book and the release of the acclaimed film, Keneally said that Jewish audiences, especially younger generations, have shared with him the deepest impact.

“The most amazing thing is that so many Jewish youngish, about your generation, or maybe in their 50s, come up and say, ‘My father or mother didn’t speak about the Camps until the Schindler phenomenon,’” Keneally said. “And insofar as I’m responsible for a small bit of that, I had no idea that this would be the result of my work.”

The Journal spoke with Israeli actor Jonathan Sagall, who played Pfefferberg in the film. Until asked, Sagall hadn’t known the seder had even taken place, as he was flying back and forth between Poland and Tel Aviv during production. So the off-camera seder with the Israeli actors portraying the Schindlerjuden and the German actors playing Nazis may not have been widely remembered by the cast. If it happened today, the photos of the moment would be all over social media. But for the director, that Passover seder was a sign that what he was doing wasn’t just making a film — it was creating an unthinkable real-life scene that inspired him between takes of the hardest work of his life.