When Pakistani filmmaker Hina Ali began researching traces of Jewish life in her home country, she didn’t expect to find much. Decades of political upheaval and religious division had nearly erased the record of the small Jewish communities that once thrived in cities like Karachi and Lahore.
Then she came across the story of Hazel Selzer Kahan — a Jewish woman born in Lahore to two doctors who fled fascism in 1930s Europe and built a life in what was then British India. That discovery led Ali to the North Fork, where Kahan, now 86, has lived for the past quarter century.
Their meetings became the foundation of Salam, Shalom, a compelling new documentary, near completion, that’s set to be aired next month at a private screening for donors at the North Fork Arts Center. The film — shot mostly in Mattituck — explores Kahan’s remarkable life and the nearly-forgotten history of Jews in Pakistan. It’s also the story of an unlikely friendship between two women separated by faith, time and geography.
Ali would arrive at the Mattituck LIRR station armed with steaming containers of Pakistani food from a favorite Brooklyn spot. Kahan answered with egg-salad sandwiches, olives on the side, assembled at her kitchen counter.
“There was something so comforting about it,” Ali said in an interview last week. “It was like one of the most cozy things.” Before long, Ali was joking that Kahan was “my American grandma.”
Kahan agreed.
“We worked along beautifully,” she said.
‘Soft borders’
Salam Shalom is an extension of a promise that Kahan said she owes her father. When he died, he left behind “nine linear feet” of writing and memorabilia and a lifetime of stories.
“I had the distinct feeling he wanted to make sure our story would be told,” she said.
Kahan’s parents, Hermann and Kate Selzer, were Jews who left Germany and Poland in the early 1930s to study medicine in Rome — but the rising tide of fascism drove them out of Europe. Hermann Selzer traveled to what was then still British India, looking for a hospital where two Jews could practice.
The couple found acceptance in Lahore, and they built a thriving medical practice there. But with the arrival of World War II, they were deemed “enemy aliens” and confined to an internment camp. Hazel was two when their yearslong internment began. Her brother Michael was a baby.
After the war, her parents resumed their medical practice in Lahore, and she and her brother attended day schools run by Catholic and Protestant orders, later enrolling in a missionary boarding school high in the Himalayas. When her parents decided to move to England, a pair of Belgian Capuchin priests tutored the children in Latin and French so they could pass English school entrance exams, Kahan recalled in an interview.
She turned 14 in London, enrolled at a progressive British school, graduated from University College London — and was a 21-year-old new mother before most classmates had finished their degrees. She moved to Australia and earned a doctorate before returning to Lahore. By 1972, when Kahan was 32, rising antisemitism in Pakistan prompted her family to flee the country and relocate to Israel.
“My understanding of national identity is very soft borders,” said Kahan, 86. “I find it very difficult to use the word ‘belong,’ because I don’t really know what belonging means.”
The documentary also braids in Kahan’s own book, “A House in Lahore: Growing Up Jewish in Pakistan,” a 2022 memoir she wrote about her family history and her love for her childhood home. Decades later, Kahan returned to Lahore, again and again.
She had spent a decade wrestling with her own past after the death of her father — a Jerusalem physician who saved “everything” and left behind a massive, cloth-bound manuscript wrapped in shoelaces. Kahan deposited all his writing with Manhattan’s Leo Baeck Institute and began giving a talk she titled “The Other Pakistan,” a thank-you to the country that sheltered her family after Hitler.
“I know you all think it’s a terrible country, and it is in many ways,” she would tell audiences. “But for me, there’s another Pakistan. It’s the Pakistan that gave refuge to my parents and me.”
One of those early presentations went viral, Kahan said, ricocheting from Jewish news outlets to Pakistan’s English-language daily, Dawn — and finally to Hina.
“She somehow managed to get in touch with me,” Kahan said.
‘Something meaningful’
When Ali read Hermann Selzer’s journals — fleeing Germany, fleeing Italy, then building a life as a doctor in India and Pakistan, before politics forced another departure — she recognized the deeper reason the material gripped her.
“He talks about always having to start again,” she said. “My journey was similar … I live here because I’m chasing something.”
An acclaimed documentarian, Ali first arrived in the U.S. on a 2013 Fulbright scholarship, an experience she said altered the course of her life.
“I felt like I belong here.”
She returned to Pakistan for several years, then came back in 2017 to pursue documentary work in Brooklyn and a freer daily life. “Living in Pakistan, I just didn’t feel like I fit in.”
Her time in New York “did something to me that I couldn’t change, or didn’t want to change. It made me more assertive, but it also gave me that taste of freedom.”
She knew New York was an international hub for documentary filmmaking, “but I also just liked the fact that I could go out in the street in the middle of the night to get a gallon of milk.”
In Pakistan, her parents had been adamant that she get married and become a housewife.
“I think that’s where me and Hazel’s dad are similar: He went to India not just to escape persecution — he could have gone to Israel at that time — but he also wanted to find a place where he could be a good doctor and do something meaningful with his life.”
Ali is careful to distinguish policy from people. “Pakistani people are not inherently antisemitic,” she said. “We are a very multicultural society … The politics of the ’70s and ’80s directed us in a wrong direction.”
The proof for her is Kahan’s own return trips to Lahore: doors opened, strangers welcomed her and old neighbors warmly recalled her parents.
“They were appreciated,” Ali said of Hermann and Kate Selzer. “They were actually part of the fabric of the society … People didn’t care about who they were or where they came from, until the country was kind of wrapped in the wave of anti-Jewish sentiment.”
At first, the notion of thriving Jewish communities in Pakistan stunned Ali.
“I was so shocked that there was so much, and how come nobody ever told me about it?”
She filmed in Jewish cemeteries in Karachi and dug up municipal traces: side streets that still carry Jewish names; civic heroes whose contributions remain, even as plaques disappear; a celebrated Jewish architect, Moses Somake, whose buildings survived only because his identity was recast as simply “British.”
The erasure, she said, was gradual. Jewish families thrived in cities like Karachi through the 1940s and 1950s. By the late 1960s and 1970s, as geopolitics hardened, the departures accelerated. By 1986, Ali notes in a postscript, news reports were describing a vanished community.
The trust between the two women allowed for delicate choices. To convey how Dr. Hermann Selzer first felt upon reaching Lahore, Ali used a short AI-generated voiceover based on his journals and trained on audio from Kahan’s home videos. She asked permission first, sent Kahan the text and the sample, and kept it only after Kahan approved. Ali is still weighing whether to keep that device in the final cut.
The research changed the younger woman in another way: it brought her closer to the catastrophe that drove Kahan’s parents out of Europe. She had grown up in a media environment in Karachi where Holocaust denial was common on television. Working through Dr. Hermann’s papers — “hundreds of pages” of printouts spread across her Brooklyn apartment — stripped the abstraction away.
She scanned family photos with Kahan and stared into the faces of one doomed relative after the next. “She was killed during the Holocaust,” Kahan would say. “He was killed during the Holocaust.” One day, on the phone with Kahan, the realization landed hard.
“I never felt this close to the magnitude of the Holocaust,” she said. “I felt a shiver in my spine.”
After five years, the documentary is nearly finished, and Ali is seeking donations to complete the final post-production phase. She said the film will be released next year and that she’ll be holding upcoming public screenings on the North Fork in the near future.
If Salam Shalom is received the way Ali hopes, it will serve as both counter-narrative and seed.
“I strongly believe that Hazel’s story is part of Pakistan’s history,” she said. “If I hadn’t made the film, probably nobody ever would, and then this story would not be documented in a way that it should be.”
She wants Pakistani audiences to see it not as nostalgia but as evidence that the national story is bigger than they’ve been told — and as an invitation for other filmmakers to document what remains.