Isri Halpern’s latest documentary, Proud Jewish Boy, which will be shown at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque on December 18, tells one of the most bizarre, complex stories from World War II. Despite Halpern’s deep dive into this twisty tale, many questions remain unanswered.
The festival, which features dozens of dramas and documentaries about Jewish life and Jewish history, runs till the end of the week (https://jer-cin.org.il/en/JJFF2025_ENG).
The movie, which won the Best Israeli Documentary Award at the Haifa International Film Festival this year and which will be shown on KAN 11 to mark Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day in the spring, is about Herschel Grynszpan, a name many have heard but few know much about. When Grynszpan is mentioned at all, it is as a footnote to Kristallnacht. He was a 17-year-old Jewish refugee who assassinated a German diplomat in Paris in 1938, an act the Nazis cynically used as a pretext for one of the most violent pogroms in modern European history, which led directly into the Holocaust. The assassin was arrested, but in most accounts, that’s where the story ends.
For Halpern, one of Israel’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, whose film, Pole, Dancer, Movie won the Best Israeli Film Award at Docaviv in 2013, that’s where the story gets interesting. “Everybody knew about the assassination at the time. And then his trial was canceled, postponed, and the story faded away. People more or less forgot about him.”
Proud Jewish Boy, Halpern’s meticulously researched and fascinating documentary, sets out to find the truth. The film does not simply retell a historical episode; it investigates why Grynszpan was erased and how his story became something of an inconvenient truth for all sides.
How a seventeen year old triggered Kristallnacht
Grynszpan was born in 1921 in Hanover to Polish Jewish parents who had lived in Germany for decades but were never granted citizenship. Like tens of thousands of Jews classified as “Polish nationals,” the family existed in a legal limbo that became deadly once the Nazis came to power. In October 1938, the German government abruptly expelled more than 17,000 Polish Jews, dumping them at the Polish border. Grynszpan’s parents were among them, stranded in appalling conditions in the border town of Zbąszyń.
Seventeen years old, stateless, living illegally in Paris, Grynszpan received a postcard describing his parents’ expulsion. Days later, he walked into the German embassy, asked to see an official, and shot Ernst vom Rath, a minor diplomat, who died two days later.
The Nazis seized on the killing as propaganda gold. Kristallnacht followed within 48 hours. Synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses were destroyed, and thousands of Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Grynszpan’s act was reframed as proof of an international Jewish conspiracy, even as he sat alone in a French prison.
What interested Halpern was not only what happened, but what did not.
“There are almost 20 books about Grynszpan,” he said. “Most of them tell the first story — the assassination — but not what came after, and not what was buried.”
It was no accident that the story was pushed into the shadows. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Grynszpan was transferred into German custody. The regime initially planned a spectacular show trial that would place him at the center of its antisemitic mythology. But something went wrong.
According to documents unearthed years later, Grynszpan told German interrogators that his relationship with vom Rath had been intimate, likely sexual and romantic. Whether the claim was true is still a matter of debate, but its implications were explosive. The German criminal code criminalized homosexuality, and Nazi leadership was obsessed with the idea of sexual “degeneracy.” A public trial risked exposing a scandal within the diplomatic corps — and undermining the very propaganda the regime hoped to stage.
“The irony is that saying he was gay may have saved him from becoming a symbol forever — but it also erased him,” said the director.
The trial was quietly canceled. Grynszpan disappeared into the Nazi prison system. No execution order was ever found, nor was a grave or a reliable death certificate. Official records list 1945 — the year the war ended — as his date of death, not because it is known he died then, but because criminals in the system with no known date of death are listed as having died when Germany surrendered.
“He died many times,” Halpern says wryly. “1942, 1943, 1945 — depending on who you ask.”
Proud Jewish Boy does not claim to solve the mystery of Grynszpan’s fate. Instead, it presents the evidence, the contradictions, and the silences. Halpern traces postwar legal battles in Germany over Grynszpan’s reputation, including lawsuits by the diplomat’s family attempting to deny the possibility of a homosexual relationship. He follows obscure archival trails, including testimony from a Jewish doctor who claimed to have treated vom Rath for a sexually transmitted disease, and intelligence files suggesting that Grynszpan may have been deliberately kept alive because his testimony was still considered valuable.
There were even postwar sightings. A photograph from a displaced persons camp, allegedly of Grynszpan, was published in major newspapers, although Halpern said he doubted it was genuine. A letter was sent to German authorities protesting that Grynszpan had been declared dead while still alive. There was even a 1960s court case in which a judge reportedly refused to grant immunity to a key witness who claimed he could produce Grynszpan to testify.
There will probably never be a way to know for sure about what really happened, but for Halpern, getting closure is not the issue: “What bothered me is that people decided it was easier not to know.”
Only a handful of photographs of Grynszpan survived the era, so Halpern incorporated handmade drawings to bridge the gaps, by the acclaimed artists David Polonsky and Michael Faust, best known for their work on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and Gidi Dar’s Legend of Destruction. These haunting, brilliant drawings make the teen assassin vivid and vulnerable, crucial qualities in a film where the protagonist cannot speak for himself.
“We didn’t want AI,” Halpern says. “We wanted something human. Something that admits uncertainty.”
That uncertainty is the film’s center: Grynszpan is neither saint nor simple martyr. He was impulsive, angry, politically naive, and yet also acutely aware of symbolism and publicity. Halpern emphasizes a crucial point often overlooked: Grynszpan did not try to escape. He surrendered to French police. He wanted a trial so he could tell the world what was happening to Jews who had nowhere left to go.
Even when later given opportunities to reshape his defense, Grynszpan refused to perform the role the Nazis wanted.
The film’s title, Proud Jewish Boy, deliberately reclaims language used by Nazi propaganda to demonize Grynszpan. It also challenges the discomfort that has lingered around his story — discomfort with ambiguity, with his sexuality, and with a Jewish figure who does not fit a heroic mold but nevertheless risked his life to defy the Nazis.
“That’s why he’s interesting,” Halpern says. “You can’t say he was only good or only bad. History prefers clean heroes. Real people aren’t clean.”
Proud Jewish Boy has already begun its international festival run, including Jewish film festivals in North America and Europe. Halpern hopes the film will travel beyond Jewish audiences.
“Most of the researchers who worked on this were not Jewish,” he said. “They were historians who just couldn’t understand why this story was dropped.”
In restoring Herschel Grynszpan to history — not as a symbol, but as a human being caught in an impossible moment — Halpern does not offer comfort. Instead, the documentary forces the viewers to sit with unresolved claims and to decide for themselves what they believe.
“We don’t know exactly how he died,” Halpern says. “But we know why people stopped asking.”