‘Schindler for the animals’: How a Jewish oligarch rescued 5,000 zoo animals from the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war

Over the past two years, many filmmakers have hesitated or refrained from bringing their films to Israeli film festivals as part of cultural boycott of Israel over the Gaza war.

But for Joshua Zeman, the decision to bring his powerful new documentary “Checkpoint Zoo” to the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival was “merely part and parcel of the whole experience of making a film about something that's been politicized that shouldn’t be politicized.”

Zeman’s film tells the dramatic story of the 2022 rescue of nearly 5,000 animals from the Feldman Ecopark zoo in Ukraine located on the Russian border outside the city of Kharkiv – on the front lines of the war – lovingly built and maintained by an animal-loving Orthodox Jewish oligarch, Oleksandr Feldman.

“There has been a lot of backlash against Ukraine here in the States, even though the film is just about people rescuing animals, so the film was already complicated for me in terms of getting distribution,” Zeman said on the Haaretz Podcast.

“Checkpoint Zoo” chronicles the efforts of Feldman, a handful of zoo workers who did not flee Kharkiv during the war and four idealistic volunteers as they risked their lives under fire from drones and bombs to remove lions, tigers, monkeys, ostriches and other animals out of from harm’s way in a modern-day Noah’s Ark.

“War by definition is brutality created to strip away your humanity. But in rescuing these animals, these volunteers not only refound their humanity, but found this unbelievable well of courage.”

Zeman sees Feldman – who allowed his luxurious mansion to be taken over by the rescued animals – as “a Schindler-esque character.”

After Feldman’s businesses in Kharkiv were destroyed by the war, he was forced to “basically sell everything to care for these animals,” Zeman recounted. “Whenever we talked about the animals, he immediately cried. He's a big crier – he is a fascinating character who espouses a lot of values from the Torah.”

Read more:

Meet Oleksander Feldman, the Lonely Ukrainian Jew Fighting His Country’s New Fondness for Nazis

'It Is a Fascist Project': The Ukrainian Filmmaker Who Withdrew From a Prestigious Amsterdam Film Festival Because of the Israel Boycott

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