Recently, we paid a visit to the cinema to see a couple of Israeli films centering around the contemporary haredi world, thinking that they might take us away from the mayhem that surrounds us every day and night. Maybe we were being optimistic.
The first film was Pink Lady, written by a Mindi Ehrlich and directed by Nir Bergman. He was one of Ehrlich’s teachers at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. The film explores the more hidden aspects of the haredi world in Jerusalem, namely homosexuality, sexuality in general, and the violence that is generated in the closed world of fanatically religious Jews, to which I have termed with a neologism, superdox. The film was chosen to represent the country in a number of international competitions.
Pink Lady centers on the family of Bati and Lazer and their three young children who are residents of the superdox Mea She’arim neighborhood in Jerusalem. Lazer works and studies in a yeshiva with regular partners, when he is not in his workshop. Bati is a supervisor at a local mikveh. But then comes the catastrophe: Lazer is attacked and wounded by a local mafioso. It turns out that Lazer is being blackmailed. The reason is his homosexuality which, if discovered, would turn him into an outcast in his very closed community.
The narrative follows Lazer’s attempts to find the money that the thugs demand. Lazer’s wife and young children are frightened by the men who come knocking on their door and beat Lazer up. The question the film asks is whether or not Bati can tolerate her husband’s off-limits sexual orientation. What is she to make of Lazer’s use of a pornographic magazine which he keeps in a semi-hidden closet, some pages of which feature a model known as the Pink Lady, a tribute to the color of her wig?
By casting off her sheitel, we see how Bati’s own little rebellion begins as she throws herself into the very unkosher world of night clubs, mixed dancing, and drinking. She even puts on a pink wig to entice her husband to loosen up and get sexy at a retreat meant to bring the couple together. Go see the movie before it is taken off the screen by irate members of the superdox community.
What is remarkable about the film is the way in which the subject matter of homosexuality and violence in the haredi community have come out of the shadows and can now be shown in public.
'Neither Day nor Night': A film on Bnei Brak's world of yeshivot
The other film we viewed was about the world of yeshivot in Bnei Brak. The film, Neither Day nor Night, follows the fate of a family of ba’alei teshuva (“returnees to the faith”) and their struggle to integrate into the very conservative and Ashkenazi community of Bnei Brak. The drama centers around Rafael, who shows great promise as a Torah scholar even at the tender age of his bar mitzvah. He understands, however, that he has no chance of being accepted to the yeshiva of his choice, Ponevitch, considered the Oxbridge of yeshivot, because of his being Sephardi.
The director, Pinechas Veuillet, relates a story that is based on his experiences in the yeshiva. Adam Peled, who plays the young boy, is excellent at portraying the vulnerability of a young boy alongside his insistence on honesty, especially among the adults under whose regime he must flourish or perish. The tragedy that results from this tension is at the center of the movie.
The film is presented as a domestic drama, but its implications are far wider. The haredi world it portrays appears on the surface to be above the norms of secular life, but under the surface this world shows the same tendency to discriminate against people it considers as outsiders.
This drama gives the film it’s disturbing edge. Ponevitch is not just another yeshiva. It is the largest yeshiva in Israel, its core student body is some 3,000 souls. For all its achievement as a power house of Torah study, it is exposed as being vulnerable to the same prejudices associated with much lesser institutions.
Together, these two films cast a light on the highly insular center of the haredi world. Both films show the inevitable tensions that bubble up under the surface. For this reason perhaps, the films left us more disturbed than we had anticipated, but impressed by their honesty and ability to reflect on authentic problems within our society.■