How do I pronounce “Iwje”?

Iwje is pronounced “Iv-EE-ay.”

Why "Iwje"?

Iwje Films was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2021, inspired by a chance meeting two years earlier. Its mission is simple: to create meaningful documentary films that uncover overlooked histories and reveal the extraordinary courage of ordinary people.

The company's first feature documentary, The Risk Takers: Muslims Who Defied the Holocaust, explores the little-known stories of Muslim families who risked everything to rescue their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust. While the film spans multiple countries and generations, its origins can be traced to one remarkable place: the small borderland town of Iwje.

The company bears its name in honor of that town.

Who are the Filmmakers?

Iwje Films was founded by award-winning broadcast journalist Jeff Hirsh, award-winning photojournalist and video editor Chris Hursh, and historian Holly Huffnagle.

The project began in April 2019 at the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center in Cincinnati. During a presentation, Holly shared how Muslim families had rescued their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust. Jeff immediately recognized that this was more than historical scholarship; it was a documentary waiting to be made.

Jeff and Chris had already spent more than twenty years working together in television news, producing award-winning documentaries and investigative stories. Together with Holly's historical research and subject expertise, the three formed Iwje Films because they believed these remarkable stories of courage, friendship, and moral choice deserved to be shared with the world.

Where is Iwje? Why is it the company’s namesake?

Before World War II, Iwje was a small multicultural shtetl-town in what was then northeastern Poland (today Belarus). On market days, Jewish merchants and Tatar Muslim farmers traded together. Muslim families delivered fresh vegetables into the Jewish quarter, Jewish ritual butchers prepared meat for Muslim holidays, children attended school together, and neighbors visited one another's homes. Iwje’s mosque, completed in 1882, was the only mosque in interwar Poland with a minaret, standing just a short walk from the town's synagogues and bustling market square. Survivors remembered a place where religious differences existed but did not prevent friendship, trust, or mutual respect.

When Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, nearly all of Iwje's Jewish community was murdered. Yet the relationships that had developed before the war laid the foundation for remarkable acts of rescue, resistance, and survival—becoming one of the first clues in a much larger, largely untold story. Today, known by its Belarusian name Iŭje, the town remains one of the historic centers of the Lipka Tatar community. Its mosque still stands as one of the oldest functioning mosques in Belarus. While little remains of the once-thriving Jewish community that shaped the town for centuries, its history lives on through survivor testimony, scholarship, and the ongoing work to preserve its memory.

Beyond Iwje? A Search That Expanded Across the World

Every documentary has an origin story. Ours began in one small town.

But Iwje was never the destination—it was the first clue.

What started in a single town grew into an international search spanning continents, archives, languages, and generations. Over the course of several years, our team traveled across Europe, Central Asia, Israel, and the United States, searching for survivors, descendants, historians, archivists, and Muslim families connected to acts of rescue during the Holocaust.

Along the way, we uncovered stories that had remained hidden for more than eighty years—stories preserved in family memories, forgotten archives, fading photographs, and chance encounters. Some answers raised even bigger questions. Others led us to extraordinary people whose lives continue to remind us that even in humanity's darkest chapter, there were those who chose compassion over hatred and courage over fear.

Iwje Films exists to tell these stories—not simply to preserve the past, but to inspire future generations.