Hazel Selzer Kahan and her family in Lahore, Pakistan (1952). SALAMSHALOMDOC.COM / COURTESY
Brooke Della Rocco, News Editor
With a packed audience, the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education center (HGI) hosted the first private screening of “Salam Shalom” through a partnership with Manhattan University. Director and producer Hina Ali, focused on the untold story of the Jews in Pakistan, following Hazel Selzer Kahan and her family’s history.
Mehnaz Afridi, Ph.D., director and professor of religious studies at Manhattan University, director of HGI and advisor to the film, hosted the introduction and questionnaire following the conclusion of the first screening.
Kahan takes audience members alongside her family’s story throughout the 30-minute documentary. Pakistan became a place of refuge for Kahan and her family while fleeing from Nazi Germany in the mid 1900s. Both of her parents, Jewish physicians, decided to leave Germany and Italy, finding a safe space in Pakistan. While her parents established their medical practice, Kahan grew up in the Muslim city of Lahore.
Kahan and Ali were both present at the screening and spoke about why they felt this story was so important to tell.
“I told you when we first connected that I’ve never really met anyone like you before,” Ali said, speaking to Kahan. “I thought I was just a Muslim woman from Pakistan trying to tell a Jewish family’s story, and it felt a little odd…I was fascinated by Hazel’s story, her connection to Lahore and her father’s journey, because I came to the U.S. from Pakistan alone.”
As attitudes abroad started to change, Kahan and her family no longer felt safe at their home in Lahore. They were forced to leave when Kahan was 32-years-old. The film compares Kahan’s memories from the past while exploring how the attitudes between Jewish and Pakistani people twisted, with her now returning to the place of her upbringing. She discovered that her family was a large part of Lahore’s history despite all the attitudes she had experienced long ago.
Kahan spoke in more depth about the contemporary relationship between cultures that she found through her friendship with Ali.
“I think once you start having these conversations with a Muslim and a Jew, you realize just how politicized we are and how oppressed we are by the government and the media and their views of our identities,” Kahan said. “We are oppressed and distorted so we, the two of us, and people like us, break them out of that [by] just asserting ourselves not in relationship to each other. We’re not contrasting each other.”
Afridi added onto why these conversations are so relevant for our political world today.
“We just exercise this cognitive, rational thing where we want to categorize people,” Afridi said. “We are not giving people room, you know, for Jews to disagree with jews and Muslims to disagree with Muslims…I think that is the problem. We’re thinking about issues that are out of our control and bringing them home to our own communities where we isolate people and we forget to listen.”
The conversation and questionnaire wrapped up on a positive note, with Ali expressing why art is necessary in today’s society and what she hopes to accomplish with this film.
“I made this film because as an artist, you make art,” Ali said. “No matter what kind of art you make, you want to say something, right? And through this film, my first realization was I wanted to preserve this small part of Pakistan’s history.”
*Editor’s Note: Post reflects updates made as of 10/08/25 at 5:15 p.m.