The episodes in the life of a Jewish family in the Once neighborhood of Buenos Aires and the other shopkeepers in a low-rent commercial gallery are depicted in the story.
"It is not a language that flows out of you", an immigrant writer says of Hebrew, which he first learned when he moved to Israel. "It's more like shoveling gravel out of your mouth."
Fourteen-year-old Nadav is hopelessly in love with his aunt Nina (Ayelet Zurer), who has recently lost her husband (Hattab). He is caught between the two worlds of his divorced parents: his mother (Waxman) is a high-strung fashionista, while his father (Ben Ari) has recently become devoutly Orthodox and withdrawn from the family in order to join a group of Hassidic Jews who tour Tel Aviv in a van, blasting the word of God through loudspeakers.
Or, lycéenne de 17 ans, vit dans un petit appartement de Tel-Aviv avec sa mère Ruthie. Cette mère se prostitue depuis une vingtaine d'années, et son état de santé devient critique. Or, qui multiplie les petits boulots, tente de mener de front travail, école, vie amoureuse et remise dans le droit chemin de sa mère...
The movie starts in 1492, in Spain. Jews are being chased everywhere. They have two choices: either to convert or to face trial and execution. Isabel (Katherine Borowitz), and Clara (Tara Fitzgerald) are growing up with terror. Although forcibly baptized, the sisters are chased through Christendom until they arrive in Venice. In Venice, Isabel organizes a secret passage in order to give refuge to the refugees who were fleeing away in the fear of the Inquisition. Isabel decides that, in order to be safe, her family must flee to Istanbul, the only place where Jews are not hated. But Clara refuses to leave, because she is in love with a Venetian named Paulo Zane (John Turturro). When Isabel somewhat tries to force Clara to move to Istanbul, Clara gets furious at the former and is almost ready to break all family ties with Isabel. In these battles of misunderstandings, Clara's young daughter Victoria (Hannah Taylor-Gordon) is trapped, who finds that she is about to be married into the same faith that murdered her own father.
Viviane (Elkabetz) is a beleaguered hairdresser and mother of four who feels tied down by her situation and her conservative husband as well as his live-in mother. Things take a turn when her former lover returns to live in Haifa.
Moshe and Mali Bellanga are an impoverished, childless, Hasidic baal teshuva ("returnees to Judaism") couple in the Breslov community in Jerusalem. After Moshe is passed over for a stipend he expected, they cannot pay their bills, much less prepare for the upcoming Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
Malte's sister Barbel is shown defending her father and insisting that he could not have known the full truth about Auschwitz, that he tried to resist or subvert the Nazi's most inhumane policies, and that the victims of Auschwitz should be thought of as casualties of war. Malte also includes testimony from a member of a Jewish family in Slovakia whose house was expropriated by the Nazis in the early 1940s.