The Mitzvah Project Program Overview

The first part of the presentation is The Mitzvah, a 23-minute, one-person stage drama. This one-act play dramatically explores the nature of prejudice through the interconnected lives of a Polish-Jewish Auschwitz survivor and a half-Jewish Wehrmacht officer who cross paths during the darkest days of the Holocaust. The play’s third character is a Groucho Marx-esque American-Jewish comedian-cum-social critic (“the Chorus”) who leavens the drama with acerbic commentary, probing the boundary between the absurd and the horrific. 

The Mitzvah is followed by a lecture and Q&A. 

In the lecture, the teaching artist sheds light on his own family’s Holocaust story and examines the unique — and tragic — history that produced tens of thousands of half and quarter Jewish Wehrmacht [German army] soldiers (mostly junior and senior officers) who were the product of two centuries of German-Jewish assimilation, intermarriage, conversion and the striving of a people committed to calling the German Fatherland their home.

The actor/teaching artist segues to American history examining the ways that America’s Jim Crow Laws and Eugenics movement provided models for the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. The talk further examines the roots of prejudice that gave rise to the Nazi regime and are still at the core of contemporary racism and “othering” in America. The last section of the presenter’s talk examines how advances in human biology and genetics totally debunk racialist mythology.

The program’s third and final segment – the Q&A – gives audience members the opportunity to ask questions, explore reactions and dig deeper into the topics and themes of the presentation.

The Mitzvah Project adds to the historical narratives about the Holocaust at a time when few survivors remain to tell their stories to younger generations. 

The Mitzvah Project was inspired by the lives of Roger Grunwald’s mother and aunt, survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, respectively. The play premiered at the Emerging Artists Theatre’s “Illuminating Artists: One Man Talking” festival in New York City under the direction of Annie McGreevey, who collaborated with Grunwald on the play’s creation.