San Diego (special) -- Before cultural arts programs took root at the Lawrence Family JCC, one legitimately might have asked the question "What's Jewish about the Jewish Community Center?" 

Built on city-owned land, and by law open to anyone who wanted to join, the JCC might have seemed just another complex of tennis courts, swimming pool, exercise equipment and gymnasium were it not for the cultural programming which in recent years has helped knit the Jewish community together perhaps more than any other program.

Under the directorship of Lynette Allen and the tutelage of an active lay committee, the cultural arts program includes this month's Jewish Film Festival, the Streisand Family Festival of New Jewish Plays in June, and the San Diego Jewish Book Fair in November.

	The JCC will become an even greater factor in San Diego's Jewish cultural life after its expansion and renovation program is completed sometime in 1999. Among other improvements such as a pre-school, the planned 45,000 square foot addition will bring to the JCC its own theatre as well as a home for the Samuel and Rebecca Astor Judaica
SCREENING--Lynette Allen, director of Lawrence Family JCC's Cultueal Arts program, and Joyce Axelrod, Film Festival chair, check out the venue at the AMC LA Jolla Theatres for the eighth annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival.

Library, which now sits in storage at UCSD. Groundbreaking ceremonies are scheduled March1. 

The upcoming 8th Annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival is the oldest of the three major cultural programs, and the most dramatically expanded. Last year it sold 10,000 tickets, and even greater sales are anticipated this year. Joyce Axelrod, who has served as volunteer chair of the film program since its inception, laughed during an interview as she remembered how far the program has come since its inception in the late 1980s. 

"We would do two or three films a year and show our films in the Jacobs Gymnasium, set up folding chairs, put the projector on a giant table, and at the beginning we didn't even hire a professional projectionist," she said. "We would show older films, send out a flyer, and get maybe 20 or 50 people there."

In 1991, on the urging of some of these film goers, the JCC stepped tentatively into the world of film festivals. "We showed four films that year at Sherwood Hall," Axelrod recalled. "We got filmmakers to come in and talk after their films were shown."

"I think we averaged 250 people per film for a total of 1,000 people," Lynette Allen said, picking up the story. "Today we are averaging 700 people per film" and the number of performances grows each year. The number grew to 11 films, last year 19, and this year there will be 25 films shown at the AMC La Jolla 12 Theatres between Tuesday, Feb. 17 and Thursday, Feb. 26.

As the program expanded and the confidence of Allen, Axelrod, and fellow committee members increased, a mission for the Film Festival emerged: to show films reflecting a diversity of viewpoints from within the Jewish community and about the Jewish community.

"Our original audience was older people, mostly from La Jolla," Axelrod recalled. "Now, as I see the crowds come in, I am sure that we are getting people from Oceanside to Bonita."

"In the beginning, Lynette and I treaded more lightly than we do now," she added. "We are more in a position to show riskier films now. Our audiences are sophisticated and we can take the chance."

"Riskier" films may include those containing nudity, or dealing with controversial subjects like homosexuality, intermarriage, or pro-Arab interpretations of the situation in Israel. Rather than censor such subjects, the film committee looks for other films which might present a contrasting point of view.

"The purpose isn't to get everybody to love everything because we know that is never going to be the case," Allen said. "If people walk away from the film talking about it then we have accomplished what we set out to do. These films should be a starting point for conversation and not necessarily be chosen to please everyone."

This year's festival explores a number of distinct themes, among them: the American Jewish experience; various views of Orthodoxy; life in Israel, and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. 

As part of the latter category, three films by the German filmmaker Michael Verhoven--My Mother's Courage; The Nasty Girl and The White Rose -- have been included, with talks by Verhoven to follow the screenings Feb. 17 and 18.

My Mother's Courage (1995) follows a proper Jewish lady who exhibits amazing kindness and politeness to aging policemen who arrest her in a nazi roundup. The Nasty Girl (1990) details a controversy created by a young German woman who decides to look into her town's nazi past. The White Rose (1982) tells of students with a printing press who bedevil Germany's nazi regime.

Other Holocaust related films are Sterne, scheduled Feb. 19; Hannah, Feb. 21; Mendel, Feb. 22; The Comedian Harmonists, Feb. 25, and The Truce, Feb. 26.

The Comedian Harmonists (1976) deals with the time leading up to the Holocaust from the point of view of the once celebrated music group which also was the inspiration for Barry Manilow's recent musical stage production of Harmony. 

Sterne (1959) is a love story set during the Holocaust. Mendel (1997) and The Truce (1996) are explorations of the lives of Holocaust survivors, with Mendel told from the vantage point of a 9-year-old boy just learning about his parents' sufferings. Hannah (1996) deals with a half-Jewish woman in modern day Austria, where neo-nazis are becoming more bold.

A special presentation for high school students, the documentary Survivors of the Holocaust, prepared from interviews conducted by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is planned Thursday, Feb. 19.

Several weeks ago, Rabbi Moshe Levin, in a United Jewish Federation panel discussing assimilation, suggested that the Jewish community must not only dwell on its tragedies if it wants to persuade youngsters there is joy in being Jewish.

Are a special presentation for high school students and eight other movies dealing with Holocaust topics too heavy a schedule? Allen and Axelrod say although most of these films deal with Holocaust subjects, they are not the kind of graphic stories of shootings, gassings and crematoria that the Holocaust almost immediately brings to mind.

Mendel, they said, is a coming of age story that will appeal to the whole family.

Besides, they said, there are other topics which are more upbeat, in particular six movies that deal with the Jewish experience in North America.

Sunday, Feb. 22, will be devoted to showing five of them: Arguing the World (1997) to be shown at noon; a trio of films screening at 2:30 p.m.: Me and My Matchmaker (1996); Bubbeh Lee & Me (1996) and Mah Zeh, What's This? (1997) and the documentary Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream. (1998), at 7:30 p.m., in its West Coast premiere,

Jewish Soul, American Beat. (1997) will round out the examination of North American Jewish life when it is shown Feb. 24.

This North American sub-theme of the Jewish Film Festival will be enhanced by the personal appearances of five film directors. Joseph Dorman will discuss Arguing the World, which follows the lives in the 1930s of New York intellectuals Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. 

Andy Wilson talks about his, Mah Zeh? What's This? a Canadian short animated film about two boys from different backgrounds. Laurel Chiten and Barbara Pfeffer provide background on Jewish Soul, American Beat, an exploration of the renaissance of Jewish culture and art in America.
And, Simcha Jacobovici has been invited to tell about Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream, a documentary about the Jewish movie moguls.

Attendees of the San Diego Jewish Film Festival will get to see Hollywoodism a full month before its cable television debut at 8 p.m., March 22, on Showtime.

Israel is far from forgotten in the film festival, especially not in this the 50th year since the Jewish State gained its independence. An eclectic selection of seven films are being offered: How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) and Song of the Galilee (1996) are paired Wednesday, Feb. 18. The classic Sallah Shabbati (1963), which made the reputation of the actor Topol, shows Feb. 20. Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955) and Second Watch (1995) , a pair of films dealing with Israeli soldiers from vantage points separated by 40 years, are shown Feb. 23. Women (1996) will be offered Feb. 25, followed the next day by House on Chelouche Street. (1973). 

Moshe Mizrachi, director of both Women and House on Chelouche Street, has been invited to discuss the two films, which are quite different in subject. House ... empathizes with a family of Egyptian Jews who find Ashkenazi-dominated Israel to be most unwelcoming. Women explores what might happen if a wife who was unable to bear children urged her husband to have a child with another woman -- a story inspired by the biblical tale of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.

A fourth broad sub-area for the film festival can be described as a potpourri of cinematic encounters with Orthodox Judaism. Thursday, Feb. 19 brings The Return of Sarah's Daughters (1993) in which one woman explores her Jewish identity by immersing herself in the lives of an Orthodox woman and a formerly Orthodox woman, who now is both a rabbi and a lesbian. That movie is paired with Nick and Rachel (1996), about a devout Orthodox girl falling in love with a Gentile man. 

A third movie in this sub-area is A Life Apart (1997), a movie about Chasidim by director Menachem Daum, who will be on hand for its screening Feb. 23. Filmed quite respectfully from an Orthodox point of view, it is an example of how films can be used to balance each other at the festival. It looks inward at the beauty of the Orthodox lifestyle, while the other two films focus on the conflicts that arise in trying to remain observant in a highly secularized country. 

Really in a class by itself is the world premiere of the cross-cultural The Jew in the Lotus (1997) in which a visit with the Dalai Lama sends a Jew on a search for his own roots.

Allen and Axelrod say that in choosing the films for each year's festivals, they constantly renew their grappling with the question "what makes a film Jewish?" Sometimes movies deal so obviously with Jewish issues (assimilation, anti-Semitism, Torah, Israel, as examples) there's no question that they qualify for inclusion. 

But sometimes, Axelrod and Allen have to stretch. For example, Axelrod, recalled, at one festival the movie Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter was selected after considerable debate.

"It had to do with a woman who chronicled her mother's deterioration from Alzheimer's," Axelrod recalled. "I said I want that for the festival and they (some members of her committee) said 'what's Jewish about that?' I said, 'well, the filmmaker is Jewish.' But what else was Jewish? We thought about what she showed in her film and there wasn't anything that was Jewish except a box of Manischewitz matzo in one scene...."

"...And The Joys of Yiddish was on one of the suitcases when she was packing and unpacking," Allen added.

"We decided that it was such an important film that we brought it to San Diego and not only that, we brought the film maker, Deborah Hoffman, who later won an Academy Award for it," Axelrod continued.

"Someone in the audience asked her in what way her film was Jewish, and Hoffman replied that she hadn't given the issue much thought until a friend had asked her if she planned to enter it into a Jewish film festival," Axelrod said. 

Hoffman said when she answered that nothing in the film was Jewish, the friend suggested 'Why don't you put something Jewish in one of your scenes' and that is how Leo Rosten's book The Joys of Yiddish found its way to the suitcase.

Over a long partnership of putting on the film festival, Axelrod and Allen -both former elementary school teachers--have compiled their own repertoire of anecdotes

To illustrate how people have different tastes, they like to tell about September Song, which in essence was a high energy revue by various performers of the songs written by Kurt Weill, a Jewish refugee from Germany. Among the more famous songs was Mack The Knife .

Axelrod recalled that some people walked out on the film saying it was too raucous and too loud, while others stopped her later to say that they loved September Song and to thank the cultural arts committee for bringing it.

And then there's the personal story that Axelrod, who is married to Joseph Fisch, likes to tell about the other Joyce Axelrod, who is married to Michael Axelrod and who also has been involved in the festival as a movie sponsor.

On a night that the other Axelrods were sponsoring a movie, sponsor Joyce walked onto the stage from one direction and said, "Hi, I'm Joyce Axelrod," and then Joyce, the festival chair, walked on from the other direction, also announcing 'Hi, I'm Joyce Axelrod."

Not only did they have the same name, the two women went on to say, but their husbands were beginning to look alike. Out they came, each taking his place alongside the other man's wife, prompting belly laughs among those members of the audience who know both couples.

Both Allen and Axelrod brim with plans for the festival's future. Once the 200-seat theatre is installed at the expanded Lawrence Family JCC, there is the possibility of including in the festival more videos, which are difficult to project at the AMC La Jolla 12 Theatres.

Axelrod said she would like to see classes offered on such topics as how to watch films and the history of film. She'd also like to have a retrospective program "The Best of the Best," bringing back some of the favorite films of past festivals.

Each year tickets are priced competitively so as not to exceed what is charged for regular movies. Currently tickets range from $5.50 to $7.50 for single seatings, with a patron series ticket going for $140. Movies may be sponsored for $2,000, with that amount divisible among various co-sponsors, Axelrod said.

"My goal is to perpetuate the festival," she added. "I would like to find an endowment."

"I feel this festival touches Jews in a way that many other activities don't," she said. "I think many of them first get in touch with their religion and background by attending the films at our festival."