LIPA SCHMELTZER - Searching For Moshe Yossi

Poised on the cusp of the Bar Mitzvah of his oldest child, Chasidic pop star Lipa Schmeltzer takes an emotional journey back through time, as he seeks to continue the legacy of the grandfather he never knew through the son who carries his name, in a documentary titled "Searching for Moshe Yossi." The second to youngest of twelve, Lipa was the first member of his family to name a child Moshe Yosef after his grandfather. "A lot of my family didn&use the name Moshe Yosef because they wanted to name their sons Yaakov Yosef after the previous Skverer Rebbe," explained Lipa. "But family begins at home and while my father may not have ever said anything about it, I wanted to name a son for his father." In an effort to give his son Moshe Yossi a glimpse into his roots, Lipa planned a pre-Bar Mitzvah trip to Budapest so that his son could have the opportunity to put on tefillin for the first time at the grave of the great-grandfather whose name he carries. "I wanted my father to come with us," said Lipa. "I wanted him to have a chance to say kaddish for his father but he refused. He said Hungary is finished, finished, and he was never going back." Lipa&father, R&Reuven Schmeltzer, survived the war, escaping Hungary on the famed Kastner train, spending several weeks in Bergen Belsen before finally arriving to safety in Switzerland. Armed with the knowledge that his grandfather had died in 1945 of typhus and had been buried by his brothers in a mass Jewish grave, known as a kever...