JTA — When Rita Zohar stepped into the role of Bessie Stern, a Holocaust survivor whose death sets in motion Scarlett Johansson’s new film “Eleanor the Great,” she wasn’t simply acting.

Zohar, 81, is a childhood survivor of the Holocaust. She was also drawing on her lived experience of loss and resilience to bring life to her character.

“This role in this movie has given me a voice,” Zohar told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Even though this is not my story, this is not what happened to me or my family, but still, by being able to verbalize it, I connected to Bessie, and I became Bessie in the film.”

“Eleanor the Great,” Johansson’s directorial debut, stars 95-year-old Jewish actress June Squibb as she seeks connection in New York City following the death of her best friend Bessie. Feeling isolated, Squibb’s character, Eleanor Morgenstein, winds up joining a support group for Holocaust survivors at the local Jewish community center.

There, when pressed by the group’s members to share her story, Morgenstein tells Bessie’s story as her own, which Zohar orates in her own words.

“At one point, they asked her, and they kind of pressure her to tell her story, and without any intention to lie, she starts telling the story as if it was hers,” said Zohar. “And then what happens in the movie is that she starts the first sentence, and then I appear and I tell the story.”

That choice, according to the script’s author Tory Kamen, was intentional. In an interview with Hey Alma, Kamen said the character Bessie was named after her grandmother’s best friend in Florida who is a Holocaust survivor.

“Another thing that was important to me was that we........

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