one filmmakers’ commitment to tracing missing memory

By Tasha Ackerman

For nearly two decades, Israeli filmmaker Boris Maftsir has devoted himself to a part of Holocaust history that has long remained in the shadows. Through his ten-part documentary series Holocaust in the USSR, Maftsir has uncovered forgotten killing sites, restored names once lost to time, and opened a window into the largely unrecorded Jewish experience of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union. I had the opportunity to meet with Boris over Zoom, just a few weeks before the final film of the series is set to premiere in June 2025. With nearly 900 minutes of screen time across the project, it’s not a complete catalogue of the more than 2,000 known killing sites, but as Maftsir puts it: “If you see these 900 minutes, you can understand what happened, where it happened, to whom, how, and finally, why.”

Based in Israel, Boris’s professional life has spanned public service and film production. Of the 200 films he produced, 40 of them were about the Holocaust, focusing primarily on Western Europe. That changed in 2006, when Yad Vashem invited him to direct a project aimed at recovering the names of Jews murdered in Soviet-occupied territories. At the time, Maftsir had already held key leadership roles in Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, as well as overseeing Jewish Agency work in Russia, Belarus, and the Baltics. His deep familiarity with the region and with Jewish communal networks made him a natural choice for the role, though the work quickly became something larger. What began as a names-recovery initiative turned into a years-long filmmaking mission to document memory that had been long obscured or lost.

Though he avoids placing himself at the centre of the narrative, Maftsir acknowledges that his own family’s history is marked by loss. Born in Riga, Latvia, he notes that much of his mother’s family, and part of his father’s, perished during the Holocaust. He was named Beryl after an uncle,  though under Soviet pressure, the name was changed to Boris. “It’s the usual Jewish family story,” he says, not to diminish the loss, but to mark how common it was. The point, he suggests, is not his personal narrative, but rather the collective one. And his films, in his words, are simply a way to help deliver that story.

When Maftsir began the project, he discovered just how incomplete the archival record was. While the names of most Jews murdered in Central and Western Europe were known, the identities of those killed across Soviet territories, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, were largely absent. The gaps were especially stark in Yad Vashem’s collections, which lacked documentation for vast numbers of victims.

He accepted a proposal to help fill those gaps, and the project quickly became consuming. Over the course of seven years, Maftsir and his team visited 160 cities, towns, and villages, working with local volunteers, Jewish organisations, and what he calls “memory keepers”: individuals who, often on their own initiative, had begun preserving stories and records in the absence of official recognition, several of whom are not Jewish.

In one example, he recounts meeting a rabbi in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, who had stacks of documents no one had ever examined. With the help of a local woman, they entered 30,000 names into an Excel sheet. In Chelyabinsk, Russia, he and his team climbed four flights of stairs to meet Bronya Rabinowitz, originally from a Ukrainian village, who had two handwritten pages to share with his team: one listing relatives killed in the Holocaust Ukraine, and the other a letter from a childhood classmate describing how only three children from their class had survived. Maftsir emphasizes that these kinds of memories, personal and often undocumented were hidden for decades under Soviet political conditions. Without visits to people like Bronya Rabinowitz, he suggests, those histories would have remained invisible.

Maftsir approached the project with a handful of core principles to guide how the films would be made. He focused on oral histories from people who had mostly been children during the events, asked only what they had seen (not what they felt), and insisted on corroborating each story with existing documentation. Just as important to him was the atmosphere: each testimony was filmed at the original location, during the same season it had occurred, to ground the memory in place and time. The result is a film series marked by quiet clarity — one that steps back from a single, individual’s narrative in order to make space for collective witness.

The Searching for the Unknown Holocaust series is freely available to watch online, a reflection of Maftsir’s belief that these stories belong to the public. Making the films accessible was part of his commitment to education, remembrance, and restoring a piece of history that had long been overlooked. The full series can be viewed at holocaustinussr.com. 

Though the films stretch across borders, Belarus’s is threaded throughout. Maftsir’s first film in the series, The Guardians of Remembrance, focused on local efforts to commemorate Holocaust victims in Belarus. From there, he continued to return to Belarusian sites, memories, and stories, tracing what he describes as a “missing memory” across the region.

For the Together Plan, this work resonates deeply. At the heart of the charity’’s mission is the act of remembering, especially in places where communal memory has been fractured or suppressed. Maftsir’s work honours those fragments and helps reassemble a collective story. He credits much of the success of the project to those on the ground in Belarus and in all of the countries covered through the films, and he acknowledges those who had the courage and commitment to preserve history, often quietly and on their own.

Now, nearly 20 years after he first began the project, Maftsir says he’s ready to step back. Still, the weight of the stories remains with him. While he never set out initially to make the Holocaust in the Soviet Union his life’s work, once he entered the world of testimony, absence, and fragment, he didn’t look away. Instead, he took on the role of conduit. It was a discipline, a responsibility. “My feeling was that I am the deliverer of the story,” he says. “I can take it in, and I can pass it on.”

Across the Searching for the Unknown Holocaust documentary project, hundreds of witnesses were interviewed collecting nearly 900 minutes of footage and so Maftsir has indeed delivered the story. Piece by piece, voice by voice, he has helped stitch together a collective memory that was long unravelled and offered it back to the world, not as closure, but as a beginning.

Maftsir’s work is a testament to the power of testimony, not just as history, but as responsibility. His films give shape to what was nearly lost, honouring the voices that might never have been heard. As I reflect on his decades-long effort to preserve these stories, I’m reminded of how much still lives in memory, unspoken and undocumented. Perhaps the most meaningful way to honour this work is to start closer to home: to ask, to listen, and to begin recording the stories that remain within our own families.