A warm-hearted old ice cream vendor journeys back to his hometown in the Ukraine, fifty years after the Holocaust, to deliver a Torah to its struggling Jewish community in Carpati, a film that the LA Times called “irresistible and poignant…full of camaraderie and intoxicating music.”

“Many people sold ice cream, but Uncle Zev was the kindest,” a young man says, explaining that even though they weren’t blood relations, he always thought of Zev as family. Zev – an orphan with few surviving relatives – listens, and his eyes fill with tears.

Carpati explores the contemporary lives and history of Ukrainian Jews through one ordinary man’s exceptional experiences. Zev was taken by Nazis when he was only sixteen-years-old and after miraculously surviving the Holocaust he returned to the Carpathian Mountains, orphaned and alone. “I had no where to lay my head,” he says, “I wandered the streets like a dog, eating wherever I could get a meal.” As he opens up to the camera and takes an emotional look back on everything he’s been through, it becomes clear that his Jewish faith has given him the strength to go on and lead a good and fulfilling life. So when he journeys from his current home in Beregovo back to his hometown of Vinogradov, he takes a Torah with him to bring hope to the dwindling Jewish community that remains there.

In addition to focusing on the Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust experience, Carpati also takes a unique look at the Nazi mass murder of Gypsies, and the intimacy felt between Gypsies and Jews in Eastern Europe as persecuted minorities. Zev doesn’t have a large Jewish community surrounding him, but he can talk about the Holocaust with his gypsy neighbors, who suffered alongside the Jews. “I cry like the rain,” Zev says, and the Gypsy street cleaner with whom he’s struck up a conversation sympathizes, having gone through similar WWII experiences.

Later, when Zev stops into Gypsy cafes and Gypsy homes, where he meets friends and is greeted warmly, the film points to the fact that the two groups share more than a history of oppression: Eastern-European Jews and gypsies also both love klezmer music. “In every [ypsy] band that was at least one Jewish musician,” one of Zev’s gypsy neighbors says. The camera watches as a mesmerizing blend of accordions and violins encourage crowds to clap and smile, and everyone circles around children with nimble feet, who dance and shake to the musician’s racing beat.

The absorbing music is not only a pleasant addition to the film, but also presents a central theme, representing a wealth that can’t be measured monetarily. After enduring WWII and Communist oppression, Ukrainian Jews and Gypsies – who, quite frankly, are lucky to be alive – are still poor and still struggling. The aged Zev is seen chopping wood in his backyard as his wife gathers lettuce from their garden and puts the teapot on to boil on the rusted stove in their tiny kitchen, conveying their simple means. But Judaism has obviously given him something more important than wealth.

Standing in his garden, remembering his encounter with the infamous Nazi “doctor” Josef Mengele, Zev attributes his miraculous survival to a higher power: “God helped me,” he says, “He gave me years.”

Luckily, the young boy was able to grow up and become an old man. But these years have seen painful changes. “It’s not what it used to be; it’s not what it used to be,” Zev mutters, sadly looking on the neighborhood of his childhood. The pond where he swam every day as a boy is now dirty and drying up. The house he grew up in has been torn down. The Jews are mostly gone—they all left for Israel after the war.

In fact, Zev can count the number of Jewish men in Vinogradov who know how to pray on one hand. “In all of Carpathia, you’ll need a candle to find a Jew in ten or fifteen years,” he says, disheartened.

But the Jews who receive the gift of his Torah are still grateful. “It will help hold us,” one man says, reinforcing the fact at the center of Carpati, that, not only for Zev but for many struggling Ukrainian Jews, faith is a crucial source of support and strength.