Kristin Scott Thomas plays Julia, a reporter for an American news magazine and she sets out to write an article on one of the darkest chapters in the history of France -- about the summer of 1942, when the French police fetched thousands of Jews from the Jewish quarters of Paris, and locked them up in the Velodrome d’hiver arena, waiting for being shipped off to the concentration camps. It turns out that the apartment Julia and her family are about to move into hides some dramatic secrets.

The Jewish educational system sought to isolate itself from other cultural influences. An anecdotal story show that the Jewish community and school were not interested in propagating outside cultures, influences or educational methods inside their educational system.

With such a demand on memory, there were ingenious memory devices and aids invented to aid in the memorization of the Torah and oral law. One such aid was involving the whole body in learning – it was thought that movement, or swaying, was a mechanical aid to memorizing.