Special to WJW

On Sept. 13, many local Jews will celebrate Rosh Hashanah in synagogue. But others will welcome the Jewish new year with a bag of freshly buttered popcorn and a cola, rather than apples dipped in honey.

These Jews will worship at the chapel at 555 11th Street, N.W.: Landmark's E Street Cinema; and their tickets will only cost $12.

That night, the Fourth Annual DC Shorts Film Festival is set to begin screening 89 short films, which span 1 1/2 to 24 minutes in length.

The reactions of the Jewish officials at the festival and Jewish filmmakers to the conflict with Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat varied.

Jon Gann, the head of the festival, said in a statement that "we were left with no other choice, but to have it this weekend.

" ... [T]here was not another weekend available to us in the fall ... . The second week in September during Arts on Foot [a visual and performing arts festival in the District] is the traditional week the festival takes place and it's always nice to stick with tradition. In the long run, I had to look out for the well-being of the festival."

But, says Gann, his "own Jewish mother, Judy Gann of Friendship Heights, has already given me a guilt trip about this."

Sarah Lazarovic, who directed Dorchester Street, says she hadn't realized that there would be a conflict, and she always spends Rosh Hashanah with her family in Ottawa.

Ben Crosbie, whose Barberin' is in the festival, however, isn't concerned. "I'm not very religious, so I don't observe Shabbat or do anything special for Rosh Hashanah unless I am with my extended family," he said.

Yoav Segal, whose The Battle of Cable Street is in the festival, did not respond to an e-mail inquiry.

According to Laura Gross, a DC Shorts spokesperson, the festival features filmmakers who are "the cream of the crop in their field" and is unique in its focus on short films, which most movie theaters tend to ignore. Gross also said the festival includes "a handful" of films focusing on Judaism's "rich culture and heritage."

"I'm very proud to be a Jewish filmmaker," said Segal, a British filmmaker whose The Battle of Cable Street was one of three films in the festival with Jewish content. "The work I do which relates to my Judaism always focuses on the behavior of Jews outside the Jewish community. I think it is extremely important to be part of the wider community of the world and to play an active part in modern day society."

Segal's film tells of London-based Jews, Irish and communists who protested British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley's 1936 march through London's East End. Segal's grandfather, Ubby Cowan, organized the protest in what Segal described in an e-mail as "a seminal event in British history as it loudly declared Britain's refusal to accept fascism."

Segal is currently working on a film on Jews fighting Spanish leader Francisco Franco and an "educational film" about a Muslim-Jewish theater group "looking for new ways to engage the sometimes separate communities."

The Jewish community should not be "insular" or "ghettoized," Segal said, behavior that is usually "motivated through fear, not rationality or positive emotional thought."

Although the other two Jewish filmmakers in the festival identify as Jews, they are reluctant to call their films Jewish. "I never set out to make Jewish films per se, but I am very much interested in history," said Lazarovic, whose Dorchester Street explores her grandmother's friendships that extended a half century. Marsha Davis' friends used to gather at her grocery store on Montreal's Dorchester Street.

Lazarovic said her family history is "very much intertwined" with her Jewish identity and referred to a "definite Jewish sensibility" in her work, "a sort of wry Jewish melancholy."

Although some of her grandmother's friends were Holocaust survivors, Lazarovic is not as interested in the war as she is in the resilience of survivors, whom she calls the last generation that connects modern North American Jews to their roots.

"When they die, who will tell us stories of life in the old country? Who will speak Yiddish?"

Crosbie is a recent graduate of Georgetown University. His Barberin', which follows three former prisoners who work at a barber shop on U Street, contains no explicitly Jewish content, and Crosbie insists being Jewish "doesn't consciously influence [his] filmmaking." But he recently returned from shooting a film at the Israeli kibbutz where he was born and lived until he immigrated to America at age 3.

Stephanie Slewka is not Jewish, but her film 415 M Street NW certainly is. The film traces the history of an Italianate Victorian house as it evolves from a home for the elderly to a place of worship for Jews, Christians and gays. It was home to the Young Men's Hebrew Association in Washington, an Orthodox congregation in the 1920s and the city's first Hebrew Home for the Aged. It later housed a Pentecostal church and then a gay house of worship.

Slewka said the film shows Judaism is not attached to place, but is instead a religion of time. She was concerned when she discovered a Hebrew inscription from Exodus on a living room wall in the house and worried it was disrespectful to live in the room. But, after the congregation moved on, she was told that "the place was no longer sacred, that the specifics of geography were of no importance."