Chananya Kramer spent the last 18 months filming daf yomi chaburos around the globe - and received the gift of a lifetime
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hen Chananya Kramer’s father bought a video camera in honor of Chananya’s bar mitzvah back in 1984, he probably didn’t suspect it would be the catalyst to catapult his creative son into the world of multimedia, eventually becoming the go-to video wizard for hundreds of thousands of Jews celebrating the Siyum HaShas. At the time, this was a state-of-the art, high-tech device that used a hard cable wire to connect the camera to the VCR. And that was just fine with Chananya — he’d been developing presentations to entertain his family since he was a little boy.
Over the years, Chananya’s combined affinity for computer applications and entertainment, under his Baltimore-based Kolrom company label, has been the creative force for hundreds of films, videos and documentaries. There’s the animated film Megillas Lester, the documentary Techeiles: It’s Not All Black and White, and the super-funny clip How Not to Perform Bikur Cholim, to name just a few you might be familiar with. (Way before that, when Chananya was division head of Camp Romimu, he created his popular “Shluffy Bokervekker” character, who came to life as an audio comedy series.)
Today his company includes several full-time employees and outsourced designers, filmmakers, editors, illustrators, and motion graphics developers, with film crews hired to shoot at different locations all over the world. And that’s how he’s been able to spend the last year and a half filming daf yomi chaburos in Johannesburg, Gibraltar, the UK, Panama, Melbourne, Mexico, and dozens of other locations, which will be included in the video presentations at the upcoming Siyum at MetLife Stadium.
Of the hundreds of interviews he’s done in preparation for the Siyum’s video section, one interviewee — one of the Siyum’s major sponsors — answered Chananya’s question, “Why do you care so much about the Siyum HaShas?” with an answer that continues to galvanize him: “To me the Siyum HaShas is like all of Klal Yisrael holding hands.”
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