Let My People Go: The Story of Israel

"Let My people go" has long served as a catchphrase for the Jewish Exodus from Egypt.[2] Its use as shorthand for liberation, however, omits a crucial dimension: God instructs Moses to tell Pharaoh, "Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness."[2] The idea of freedom encoded in the Exodus is therefore freedom oriented toward purpose — toward covenant, obligation, and service — rather than mere emancipation from constraint.[2]

In the twentieth century, American Jewish activists invoked the phrase alongside overt Jewish symbols, such as the shofar, in campaigns on behalf of Jews oppressed under Soviet rule.[3] That language connected the plight of Soviet Jews to the archetypal Jewish experience of bondage and redemption, drawing a direct line from the biblical narrative to contemporary political struggle.[3]

The documentary opens with imagery of modern Israel set against a remembrance of those killed by the Nazis, then moves backward in time to historical scenes of Solomon's Temple in flames, Jewish exile from the land, and the late-nineteenth-century pogroms that ravaged Jewish communities in Russia.[1] From there, the film introduces Theodor Herzl as the father of modern political Zionism and recounts how he formed the Zionist Organization in 1897 to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine.[1]

The pre-war section depicts Jews fighting alongside the British in 1917 and Jewish men and women working the land in British-administered Palestine.[1] The film then presents the 1929 violence as an Arab effort to drive Jews from Palestine, before tracing the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the arrival of Jewish refugees in Palestine, and Britain's eventual withdrawal of support amid the ensuing turmoil.[1]

The Holocaust segment is among the film's most harrowing. It portrays the Warsaw Ghetto, describing 450,000 Jews confined to a single square mile, and depicts children attempting to smuggle food through sewers, the spread of typhus, and mass graves.[1] The film then shows deportations to concentration camps and states that 6,000 Jews were gassed daily at Auschwitz.[1]

The film's postwar narrative follows Jewish survivors in European displaced-persons centers, with David Ben-Gurion urging immigration to Palestine.[1] It depicts Haganah operations to bring refugees to the land, including the striking image of survivors trudging through snow over an alpine pass before reaching the Italian coast and boarding a ship.[1] The British intercepted the voyage after a ten-day journey at sea; some refugees were interned in camps in Palestine in August 1946, while others were redirected by ship to Cyprus — this under a monthly immigration quota of just 750.[1]

The film connects the armed struggle against British rule with the July 22 bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel, which it says killed 80 British soldiers.[1] It then recounts the arrival of a United Nations committee in June 1947 and the November 29, 1947 UN vote for partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.[1]

The documentary's closing sequence depicts the end of the British Mandate, the departure of the last British officer, and Ben-Gurion's declaration of Israeli independence on May 14, 1948.[1] The film shows the armies of five Arab states entering the conflict and quotes Jordan's ruler, Abdullah I: "this will be a war of extermination."[1] Its final images include Jews leaving Cyprus, families reuniting, and rusted-out vehicles lining the road to Jerusalem — presented as a testament to the survival of the Jewish state in the War of Independence — alongside a woman planting a tree in memory of Holocaust victims.[1]

The film's title phrase gained renewed urgency in the context of Soviet Jewry advocacy during the 1960s and beyond. The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ) was founded at Columbia University on April 27, 1964, and used demonstrations, congressional lobbying, and information-sharing to press for Soviet Jews' freedom and right to emigrate.[3] Just four days after its founding meeting, the organization staged a demonstration of more than 1,000 students at the Soviet Union's Mission to the United Nations.[3]

The SSSJ explicitly embraced overt Jewish symbols — including the shofar — and biblical phrases such as "Let My people go" as part of its public identity.[3] This approach reflected increased visible Jewish identification among young American Jews in the wake of Israel's Six-Day War victory.[3] The organization remained active from 1964 to 1991, and its campaign formed part of the international public pressure credited with helping bring about mass emigration and the release of refuseniks and prisoners of conscience from the Soviet Union.[3]

The available archival page is an item description of the documentary rather than an independent historical study.[1] Its descriptions of the 1929 violence as an Arab effort to drive Jews from Palestine, the King David Hotel bombing as killing 80 British soldiers, and Abdullah I's "war of extermination" statement should therefore be read as elements of the film's narrative.[1]

The same limitation applies to statistics in the archive description, including 450,000 Jews in one square mile in the Warsaw Ghetto and 6,000 Jews gassed daily at Auschwitz. These figures are presented here as claims made in the film's account, not as independently verified totals.[1]