Close-up On The Jewish Community

Menachem Daum shooting on the streets near his house in Borough Park. Michael Datikash

Menachem Daum shooting on the streets near his house in Borough Park. Michael Datikash

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

Pearl Gluck:
‘Divan’ And Beyond

The divan sits regally against the wall of Pearl Gluck’s tiny fifth floor walk-up apartment. Hanging above and all around are works in needlepoint, some stitched in Hebrew and made by her grandmothers, others acquired more recently. Gluck is looking for a place to put a new addition, a depiction of Leda and the Swan, wondering if naked Leda is too risqué to share wall space with Grandma’s needlepoints. She decides it is not.

Gluck’s career as a filmmaker has been characterized by just such juxtapositions of traditional and contemporary, religious and secular. Her first feature-length documentary film, “Divan,” was about the search for a century-old Hungarian sofa that chasidic rebbes supposedly slept on; the eponymous divan is the one now taking up a wall of her living room. The film also explores Gluck’s personal family history, a reconciliation, she says, “between where I came from and where I am.”

She grew up in Borough Park, but left the fervently Orthodox world as a teenager and went to study at Brandeis, where she eventually won the first Yiddish Fulbright scholarship to Hungary. “Divan,” completed in 2004, asks questions about belonging — to a community, to a religion, and also, “where do we belong as artists in our own work?” She sees “Divan” as a chasidic tale, like the ones she grew up reading and hearing, only in a visual, imagistic form.

“I’m a very visual person,” she says, “and I’m coming from a place where film itself is not supported, so the actual medium is questioned.” In the film she interrogates herself about where she belongs as a woman and an artist, and also interviews prominent Jews who left religious backgrounds to pursue different lives.

Sitting in her editing studio, curly blonde hair flowing and dark glasses framing her face, Gluck screens scenes from her new project, a short film about a Polish cleaning lady who goes to work for a Satmar family in Williamsburg, and the crisis of faith that ensues.

“I’m none of these characters and in a way I’m all of them,” she says as she watches the screen. During filming, she and her cast and crew were confronted by a crowd of 300 angry religious men who demanded that she stop shooting; some key scenes were left unshot, but Gluck says the quarrel also helped the actors get into their characters, recognizing what was at stake and just how provocative their subject is.

The new film follows the 2007 documentary she wrote and directed called “Williamsburg,” which literally crossed the bridge from Manhattan, where Gluck now lives, to the Satmar enclave in Brooklyn, where some of the neighborhood characters are closely portrayed.

“You live out certain questions, journeys, by giving them to your characters,” she says. “It’s so Jewish to question, but it has to be done in the right way. My wrestling with the angels is internal.”

Before a visitor leaves, Gluck takes two Polaroid pictures; one goes into her photo album, full now of nearly 500 pictures of people who have come to visit her and sit on her divan; the other goes with the guest down five flights of stairs and out into the night.

Menachem Daum:
Breaking Down Walls

When Menachem Daum strolls through Borough Park, Brooklyn, he looks like any other white-bearded grandfather who has long been a fixture of the neighborhood. But in the basement of his house, his stacks of tapes, editing equipment and movie posters point to another life, that of a filmmaker who has made it his mission to suss out the contradictions within Jewish life and explore the complexity inherent in every character’s and person’s life story.

In 2004, Daum (along with partner Oren Rudavsky) made the documentary film “Hiding and Seeking,” about his family’s return to the Polish homestead where they were saved by peasants during the Holocaust.

That was the plot, anyway. The film speaks more deeply to how religious intolerance is insidious no matter who is practicing it, and upbraids Holocaust survivors who broke all ties with their rescuers, despite wartime promises to stay in touch forever.

“I believe in the importance of self-criticism for all communities, Jewish, non-Jewish Islamic, Christian,” says Daum. “We do ourselves a disservice when we can see faults in others but not see our own shortcomings.”

Daum is an unlikely candidate to become a renegade filmmaker. Raised by chasidic Holocaust survivors, he worked for years in the field of gerontology. When his mother developed Alzheimer’s and his father had a stroke, he realized that he was supposed to be an expert on aging, but had no idea what to do for his parents.

So he made a film about caring for elders, got good feedback, and unexpectedly found himself hooked on film. “If I have something to say I can probably say it in a way where it has more impact on film than the printed word,” he notes.

His documentaries, including 1997’s “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” are not popular or easy to take, but they’re firmly grounded in Judaism, even as they step back to take a broad, analytical look at what is done in the name of Judaism.

“I take ideas that move me and that probably don’t have much commercial value. They’re not going to play on 4,000 screens across the U.S., but I do the work because I feel I have something to say.”
His next project, tentatively titled “Common Ground,” returns to Poland and explores the non-Jews who are devoting their lives to preserving Jewish cemeteries in Poland, and what moves them to do this sacred work.

“I’m really just making one film over and over and over again,” says Daum. “It’s about breaking down the walls that divide Jews from the rest of mankind.”

Ellen Friedland & Curt Fissel:
A Lens On Hope

Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel specialize in finding the hope in hopeless situations. Whether portraying Kosovar, Albanian refugees building new lives after genocide, documenting Ugandan farmers who form an interfaith coffee collective to bring peace to their town, or exploring the rebirth of Jewish life in a Polish city, the filmmakers are fiercely committed to telling complicated stories that have positive messages, even in the face of despair.

“We’ve seen a lot of ugly things in the world and at some point I got to the place where I said the world seems hopeless,” says Friedland of the team’s approach to documentary. “So we’ve been trying to look at the good stuff, even if that arises from the bad stuff.”

Documentary filmmaking was not the obvious path for either Friedland or Fissel. Fissel was manager of news and chief photographer for NJN, New Jersey public television, for almost 20 years, while Friedland first trained as a lawyer and later became a journalist. They met on a research trip to Poland in the mid-1990s, where they learned about the Jewish life re-emerging there after communism.

“I thought I was going to experience Jewish death, but I found all this Jewish life back at a time when nobody was talking about that. I was looking at the hope... that had grown out of the Holocaust and discovered the miracle of the rebirth of Jewish life in Poland,” she says. They decided to make a documentary, and ended up romantically as well as filmically involved, marrying in the synagogue in the Polish city of Wroclaw.

Reconstructionist Jews (Fissel underwent a Conservative conversion to reconnect with his distant Jewish roots) who work from their studio in Montclair, N.J., Fissel, a big, bear-like man with a camera perpetually perched on his shoulder, and Friedland, a petite, fiery brunette, feel their Jewishness leads them to be interested in stories of all faiths.

“For us there’s a total openness. We’re definitely affiliated, a part of the Jewish community, but at the same time we’re liberal Jews and want people to do anything they want to do, which enables us to hop from community to community and do it with objectivity,” Friedland says. “I don’t feel that we’re dogmatic about any kind of religious view, either in Judaism or any other religion.”

“Delicious Peace Grows in a Ugandan Coffee Bean”, their latest project, is currently being completed, and in addition to viewing the film, faith communities can also buy the farmers’ coffee.

“Documentary can be more than just a passive experience, it can be a participatory experience,” says Friedland, citing the Uganda project as a way that people can see a film, then buy the coffee, and thus become involved. “The documentary becomes a vehicle for people to get involved. The more the farmers benefit, the more roofs on houses, children going to school, they’re happy with each other and there will be peace. This is an avenue toward making peace in the world.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization