The Jewish Community Center and the George Eastman House join forces this week to bring the first-ever Rochester Jewish Film Festival to area movie-lovers. The festival offers a very diverse selection of films: war drama, a sing-along musical, concentration camp documentaries, a silent film, and a comedy about foreskin. Apart from the $18 opening and closing night films, which are both followed by receptions, these films will set you back $7 a pop ($6 for students). If you're in for the long haul, the $99 Festival Pass might be worth checking out. Not only does it reduce your overall cost per film, it gives you first crack at the best seats in the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House, where each screening is taking place.

Things kick off this Thursday with the highest profile film in the festival --- Amos Gitaï's 2000 Cannes competitor Kippur, a powerful look at the 1973 Yom Kippur war, in which Syria and Egypt double-teamed Israel in a surprise attack on the Day of Atonement. With battle scenes à la Saving Private Ryan, Gitaï does a wonderful job of showing the tedium of war by using a series of lingering, carefully choreographed shots, filmed by a stationary camera placed some distance from the action.

The film opens with young Weinraub (Liron Levo) and his girlfriend smearing paint all over their naked bodies, a fitting contrast to the mud that will cover him and his fellow soldiers a little later on in the film. When the war breaks out, Weinraub fetches his friend Ruso (Tomer Russo), so the two can find their unit to begin defending their country. The two literally drive right into the war while looking for their unit, eventually hooking up with an ad hoc helicopter rescue team led by a doctor named Klausner (Uri Ran-Klausner, from Gitaï's Kadosh).

The horror the men witness while attempting to lift an injured pilot to safety is unforgettable, especially to director Gitai, who, at 23, experienced the Yom Kippur War in a manner quite similar to Weinraub. It's refreshing to see a war film that isn't filled with the typical stock characters usually found in American offerings (you know, the black guy, the scared guy, the hillbilly, the guy from New York City, the religious guy and the white guy who saves the day). It's also nice to see Gitai tackle this subject matter with a complete lack of religious subtext, as opposed to Kadosh.

Although the manner in which Gitaï shoots Kippur is technically interesting, the problem with showing the boredom of combat is that it doesn't always make for exciting cinema (kind of like that sniper drama Enemy at the Gates). He also ups the ante by never once letting the audience see the enemy and by using a corps of actors with virtually no experience in front of the camera. One of the film's last shots is of a large field filled with mud, water and smoldering debris, which made it look kind of like Woodstock '99.

The festival's next film is so promising, they're running it twice (Saturday at 7 and 10 p.m.). Dad on the Run begins with a young man named Jonah (Clément Sibony) lying, near death, in the back of a frozen fish truck in Paris. Luckily, that's the end of the story, which we see played out in one long flashback.

In the flashback, Jonah and his wife Julie (Marie Desgranges) have just had a baby, and, much to their surprise, the child is a boy. Reeling from the ultrasound's failure to accurately predict the sex of their offspring, Jonah and Julie have to quickly decide which circumcision ritual to have performed (he's Sephardic; she's Ashkenazi). They settle on a North African ceremony in which the father is supposed to bury his newborn's "little end" within three days of the rite.

Well, Jonah forgets about the foreskin until the last minute and is forced to duck out on his two-man Bar Mitzvah band partner Paco (short for Patrick Cohen). His journey to find a good spot to bury his son's tip begins to go awry in a way that will make fans of Martin Scorsese's After Hours titter with delight. He meets a series of goofy strangers, including a horny ex-classmate who happens to be both the mother of the Bar Mitzvah boy and the wife of a ruthlessly jealous gangster who sees the two sharing a somewhat intimate moment.

Before long, Jonah has lost Paco's van, his shoes and his son's foreskin, and he's being chased by the gangster's three hapless henchmen. Dad is set against the backdrop of the 1997 Papal visit to Paris, which brings out all the religious zealots as well as a firecracker of a Romanian woman with a serious age complex. So what else could top off the wackiness but a big, red ZZ Top beard?

On Sunday, take part in a matinee performance of what we can safely say is the closest thing anyone will ever see to a Jewish version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That's right --- Norman Jewison's beloved Fiddler on the Roof, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, time-warps its way back to Rochester. This is your big chance to dress as your favorite Fiddler character and belt out the film's popular tunes along with everybody else in the audience (I'll be the guy dressed as Topol's mighty beard).

If German Expressionism is more your speed, then you'll definitely want to check out The Golem on Sunday night (8 p.m.). Despite being over 80 years old, the film's photography is still haunting to this very day, thanks to cinematographer Karl Freund, who later went on to direct the original version of The Mummy in 1932. The chilling 1920 film will be presented with live piano accompaniment from Philip C. Carli.

You want award-winning drama? You've got it with Voyages (Monday 8 p.m.) and Left Luggage (Tuesday 8 p.m.). Voyages' Emmanuel Finkiel won a Cesar Award (the French Oscar) last year for Best New Director, while the film's editing also took home the top prize. It tells the stories of three different people in three different countries (France, Poland and Israel) who are each hunting for three different things. Jeroen Krabbé's Left Luggage is about a Belgian college student who becomes a nanny to a family of Hasidic Jews (Topol plays the father). Although she is unfamiliar with any Jewish customs, the nanny is able to bond with the family, which ultimately brings her closer to her own parents. This film won three awards at the Berlin Film Fest, including a special mention for actress Isabella Rossellini.

The RJFF boasts many different documentary films, as well. Included among them are From Swastika to Jim Crow (Sunday 5 p.m.), focusing on a group of Jewish folk who fled Hitler's Germany to take up residence in the United States as scholars in the still-segregated South, and Peace of Mind (Tuesday 4 p.m.), showing the Seeds of Peace summer camp, which is attended by both Israeli and Arab children. A discussion of the film will take place after the screening.