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After Zvi Bielski went skydiving in Florida, he was eager to show his father the video of his experience. It was then that he learned how hard it is to impress someone whose partisan group saved more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

Upon watching the footage, all Zus Bielski could reply was "Well, you had a parachute, didn't you?"

That was just part of the personal touch which a crowd of over 100 in Manalapan might not have gotten earlier this year from the movie "Defiance," which depicted the efforts of the Bielski partisans. On the fast of Tisha b'Av, July 30, Zvi retold the story of his father Zus and uncles Tuvia and Asael Bielski at the Chabad of Western Monmouth County.

About 20,000 Jews are alive today worldwide because of the people saved by the Bielski brothers, who formed the largest resistance group in World War II, Zvi said. While other partisan groups focused heavily on recruiting young men who could fight the Nazis, the Bielskis made sure to save anyone they could.

"The Bielskis took the old, the sick, the young," Zvi said. "Everybody was accepted in the group."

Since the Bielski brothers grew up near the forest in what is now Belarus, and had considerable experience as hunters and woodsmen, they were able to survive on horseback for two-and-a-half years during the war, he said.

As Jews in the ghetto heard about the Bielskis, they got excited about the group and suddenly had incentive to flee to the forest themselves.

"It's not that complicated if you don't have any choice," Zvi said of living in the woods.

Zvi explained that Tuvia ran the Bielski family camp, where men were armed and boys gathered food. Zus patrolled the area for Nazi groups, he said, and Asael was the original commander of the whole partisan group.

A scene from "Defiance," in which the partisans waded through a vast swamp while fleeing the Nazis, took 14-15 days in real life, Zvi said. The scene stirred some controversy because Zus (played by Liev Schreiber) shot a man who refused to go back and find his wife and child. During one speech Zvi gave in Deal, he said he was confronted about how his father could have possibly killed a fellow Jew.

Zus eventually found the man's family himself. Forty-five years later, the woman who Zus saved in the swamp recognized him as he was walking on Dizengoff St. in Tel-Aviv, Zvi said.

"If he didn't kill him, hundreds may have died, because they would've went the wrong way [in the swamp]," Zvi said.

Asael was killed in the war, and the Soviets wanted the lives of Zus and Tuvia afterwards, so the brothers fled to Romania. They initially couldn't reach Israel because of the strict immigration quotas of the British white papers, but Moshe Sharett, Israel's second prime minister and at the time an aid to David Ben-Gurion, who would become the first prime minister, heard of the Bielskis' heroism and got them through, Zvi said.

The Bielski family visited Lithuania for the filming of "Defiance" during a harsh winter, Zvi said, and several cast members marveled at how his father's group survived three winters in the forest during the war. When Zvi asked actor Daniel Craig, who played Tuvia and is most recognizable for his role as James Bond in recent films, "Hey James, are you ok?" Craig responded, "Hey Bielski, my name is Daniel and I'm freezing here."

The winter stopped the Nazis from overtaking the Russians during the war, yet the Bielskis thrived in that environment, Zvi said.

"For the brothers, it just became part of life, that we were going to survive this at all costs, or at least try to," Zvi said.

While the Bielskis' top goal was to save as many people as possible, the brothers were also vengeful of families who killed Jews. Zvi said the brothers would go into Russian homes posing as Soviet partisans, and ask the families "Have you caught any Jews lately?" After the families described what they had done to Jews, the Bielskis revealed their true identity, killed them, burned down the homes, and put up signs that read: "This is the price to pay for killing a Jew."

About a week before Zus died in 1995, Zvi remembered that he told him, "Let the whole world know that Jewish blood is expensive, because I won't be here soon."

Asked about how the Bielskis got their weapons during a question-and-answer session, Zvi said that when 50 trucks past the group and one inexplicably stalled, the partisans killed the Nazis on board and obtained 75 machine guns. Zus also took the jacket of a Nazi officer and donned it throughout the war to spite his enemies, Zvi said.

When one audience member suggested that many Jews couldn't fight back as well as the Bielskis did because they grew up in cities, Zvi offered the analogy of American civilians trying to fend off the U.S. military with no preparation.

Regarding his interactions with Daniel Craig, Zvi said that "If you see him in New York City he won't talk to you," but that on the set he was a very nice guy. Craig was drawn to the role because his father was a British soldier who liberated a concentration camp, Zvi noted.

Rabbi Levi Wolosow, who runs adult education at Chabad of Western Monmouth and is the outreach coordinator for Chabad of Morganville, invited Zvi to speak. The content of the lecture was strongly connected to the fast of Tisha b'Av since all persecution of the Jewish people is traced back to that day, said Rabbi Boruch Chazanow, director of Chabad of Western Monmouth.

The Second Temple was destroyed on Tisha b'Av because of sinat chinam, the baseless hatred Jews had for each other, and the Bielskis exemplify the complete opposite value, Chazanow said.

"This story displays the great amount of Ahavat Yisrael (love for your fellow Jews) to the point where Jews put their lives at risk to save not just a friend, not just a relative, but total strangers throughout the Shoah (Holocaust)," Chazanow said.