When the lights went up after "Schindler's List" at the Dom Kino on Sunday afternoon, even the ushers were at a loss. For several long minutes after the applause had died down, no one filed out or even rose from their seats.


At the first of 24 free screenings of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust epic, a very select Russian audience reacted exactly as expected: emotionally. Military students, concentration camp survivors, World War II veterans and Jewish families sat side by side, stunned into silence after the three-hour film.


A coalition of Jewish groups organized the event to kick off a six-month program in which "Schindler's List" will be shown weekly to a hall full of invited guests. Two American businessmen have offered to finance the project with the express purpose of disseminating "Schindler's List" in an atmosphere they perceive as anti-semitic, said Rabbi Josef Cunin, who leads the Moscow Lubavich synagogue.


"I thought this was the biggest thing I could do in this country to fight anti-semitism," Cunin said. "Here in Russia, they know what the Second World War was. It was always perceivable in their minds. But now they can visualize it."


The free screenings will likely mean box-office losses for the first Spielberg film ever to open officially in Moscow. East-West Creative Association, which distributed "Schindler's List" in Russia, donated the film for the effort, said Nicolette Kirk, general manager for the firm's Moscow office. Although Amblin International, Spielberg's production company, will lose some of its public through free screenings, the film's revenues were neither very promising nor very important to its director, she said.


"To be honest, the margins on this film are going to be very small anyway," Kirk said. "Spielberg is less interested in making money on this one, so that has been our policy in distribution."


Military students were targeted expressly because they will make up Russia's future armies. "They are going to be holding guns years from now, if they aren't already," Cunin said. "I think this film will never vanish from their minds."


As they filed out of the movie, though, it was the older viewers who were visibly shaken.


"We have seen this all before, we have been to these places, we remember," said Ida Zaidel, who said that aged 8 she was interned in a Ukrainian concentration camp, and had been invited by an association of camp survivors. "It was just like that. This one would be shot, that one would be murdered."


"I lost my entire family," said Meyer Sholkovitz, 76, who was invited by a war veterans' association. "My mother, my father, my sister, my brother. I was the only one left."


Despite the film's much-touted didactic role, some viewers reacted only with horror, and many spoke afterwards about the threat of anti-semitism in their own lives.


Yanna Klimovitz, who was invited by her synagogue, slipped out early. Although she and her family have never been the direct victims of hate crime, she said she had been terrified last December when the Marinoi Roshchi synagogue was destroyed in a fire which many suspected was arson. Even the genocide depicted in Spielberg's film did not seem so far off, she said.


"The worst thing is, this could happen again at any moment in Russia," she said. "I live in a state of constant fear. I worry about my children."