LOS ANGELES — The place is the Warsaw Ghetto, the year 1942, and the black-and-white footage shows fashionably dressed men and women, with yellow Stars of David as accessories, having a high time at a champagne ball.

Later we see emaciated kids rooting through mounds of garbage and excrement for scraps of food.

The contradictory scenes are from “A Film Unfinished,” an unwitting collaboration between a Nazi propaganda crew and an Israeli filmmaker separated by nearly seven decades.

In May, 1942, a German film crew in Wehrmacht uniforms arrived at the Warsaw Ghetto with somewhat vague orders to shoot a documentary on the many aspects of ghetto life in order to show the Jewish “folk” character.

LOS ANGELES — Even before my ketubah was signed my soon-to-be mother-in-law, Shirley, calmly but proudly told me, “Edmon, my mother’s family, the Sheinbeins, are descendants of the Vilna Gaon.”

Maybe I was marrying into Jewish royalty, of a sort.

The Vilna Gaon, who lived from 1720 to 1797, was a Talmudic scholar, author and the major non-chasidic Jewish leader of his age. Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman was so learned a rabbinic authority that he was known as “gaon,” a title meaning genius.

Many claim to be his descendants. It’s a common claim of yichus, of lineage, and an uncommonly difficult one to back up.