By Cindy Mindell

Documentary filmmaker Oren Jacoby was in the barber’s chair in New York a few years ago when he first learned of a foundation called “Italy and the Holocaust.”

“The barber said to another customer, ‘Joe, you’ve got to meet Oren, a great director. He was just nominated for an Oscar’ and the guy sitting down in the chair said, ‘That’s funny: I need a director; we’re trying to make a movie,’” recalls Jacoby, a former Connecticut resident.

The “Joe” in this scene is Joseph R. Perella, an Italian-American businessman who had read in the Wall Street Journal about a little-known World War II phenomenon: 80 percent of Italian Jews had survived the Holocaust – despite the fact that the country’s fascist government was a Nazi ally and Germany invaded Italy in 1943.

Perella is board director of Italy and the Holocaust, Inc., a non-profit foundation created in 2010 to publicize this chapter of Italian history. With funding provided by the foundation, Perella had teamed up to produce a documentary film with several fellow Italian-Americans, including Elizabeth Bettina, the granddaughter of an Italian Jewish survivor and author of It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Holocaust. The resulting documentary, My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes, opened the 2014 Rome Film Festival, and will be screened on Thursday, March 31 at Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport, followed by a Q&A with Jacoby, who lived on a farm in Ridgefield as a child.

The filmmaker had first touched on the subject of Italian Jews in his 2008 film adaptation of Constantine’s Sword, a 2001 book by former priest James Carroll that explores the history of the Catholic Church’s violence against Jews. Much of the film was shot in Rome, whose Jewish population of 12,000 had largely survived the war.

For My Italian Secret, Jacoby returned to Italy with Perella and a film crew to follow an Italian-Jewish survivor, now living in the U.S., who wanted to show her grandson where she had been hidden during the war. While there, Jacoby heard about “International Week of Coppi and Bartali,” a bicycle race in tribute to late Italian cycling champions Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. During the war, Bartali traveled throughout Italy on his bicycle while pretending to train for competitions, delivering forged documents to allow hidden Jews to travel north to safety.

Before leaving Italy, Jacoby hired an Italian crew to film the race and interview Andrea Bartali, the son of the cyclist and an organizer of the week-long race.

“Andrea Bartali was the only person who really knew the story of his father,” Jacoby says. “Gino hadn’t confided in anyone else because he didn’t want to brag about what he had done; he didn’t feel it was a good thing to profit in any way from the suffering of other people.”

Bartali ran his wartime rescue missions at the behest of the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, and for the Assisi Underground, a part of the Italian resistance network that was run by priests. It was only after Bartali’s death in 2000 that his story began to be known, thanks to Andrea. Bartali was recognized in 2013 as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Jacoby was introduced to other Italian-Jewish survivors, both in Italy and in Israel, who are also interviewed in the film. When My Italian Secret opened in Rome in October 2014, a media frenzy ensued.

“People didn’t know that Bartali had secretly done all this amazing stuff and they didn’t know that there had been so many Italians who had risked their lives during the war to save Jews,” says Jacoby.

All the major Italian newspapers covered the film, including the Vatican newspaper, which published a spread mapping the various monasteries and convents that had sheltered Jews during the war.

Earlier this month, Israel’s Cycling Academy organized a one-day ride, before competing in the International Week of Coppi and Bartali, in tribute to Bartali. The 13 Israeli athletes were joined by top cyclists from Canada and Namibia in tracing the 115-mile route between Bartali’s home in Florence and the wartime resistance base in Assisi.

A graduate of Brown University, Jacoby lived in Stonington for several years, then earned an MFA in directing from the Yale School of Drama.

“The film tells a positive and heroic story but, as James Carroll said at a Boston screening, the fact that these few Italians were able to save so many, imagine if more people had done the right thing,” says Jacoby. “One person doing the right thing makes a difference. The most important point of the film is that our values and what we do based on our values really matters, and one person thinking and doing the right thing, based on love rather than hate, can save the world.”

My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes with filmmaker Oren Jacoby will be screened on Thursday, March 31, 7 p.m., at Congregation B’nai Israel, 2710 Park Ave. in Bridgeport. For information: cbibpt.org / (203) 336-1858.