ORT stands for Obschestvo Remeslenovo i. Zemledelcheskovo Trouda [Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor]. Russian authorities started the group in 1880 to fund and assist Jewish trade schools and establish new colonies, agricultural schools and model farms in order to help lift Russia's five million Jews out of lives of crushing poverty. Today, ORT continues to train and educate Jews worldwide, provide them with the skills and knowledge necessary to cope with complexities and uncertainties of their environment, and foster economic self-sufficiency, mobility, and a sense of identity.
Born in Russia in 1897, Roman Vishniac was a biologist by training, having earned a doctorate in zoology and a medical degree from Moscow universities and a doctorate in Oriental art from the University of Berlin. For many years he was prevented from working in any of those fields because of war, revolution and political persecution. He instead pursued a career in microphotography, the photographing of insects, cells, plankton and other small organisms. His images in this area regularly appeared in Life magazine. From 1935 to 1938, Vishniac explored on foot the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, recording life in the Jewish shtetlekh (villages) of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania, communities that even then seemed threatened by routine change as much as by violence and extermination. Using a hidden camera and working under difficult circumstances that included evading the police and also Nazis, he was able to take thousands of photographs. Before he finished the tour, he had been jailed eleven times and placed in a concentration camp in Vichy France. Roman Vishniac died in 1990.
In 1939, Roman Vishniac was commissioned to make a promotional film at a Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT) vocational training facility near Marseille. The film was never completed, and only outtakes have survived. ORT schools throughout Europe worked to train and certify Jewish refugees in whichever skills were most desired by host countries. When French military mobilization reduced the available agricultural manpower, ORT refugees provided labor, and also eased the immersion of these foreign workers into French society. ORT training activities. Group of men with suitcases walking through town streets. Group of men with farm equipment over their shoulders. CUs, men working in a greenhouse. LS, tilling soil in fields. EXT, farmhouse, men building window frames. Tilling soil and digging irrigation canals. MSs, men. Man pushes wheelbarrow with pipes for irrigation. Playing bocce. Digging maneur. 01:04:06 (some shots out of focus) INT, men enter classroom, sitting at desks using drawing tools. ECUs and MSs. More shots of men learning in classroom. Teacher at chalkboard.
Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT) training at Marseilles