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Menachem Daum, the film director who co-produced the groundbreaking 1997 documentary that shed light on the insular world of American Hasidism, died on January 7 at a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. .he was 77 years old.
His death was confirmed by his friend Eva Fogelman, author of a book about Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum was being treated for congestive heart failure.
What made the documentary “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America” so impressive was that it had people who despise film and television sit in front of cameras and do revealing interviews, documenting their customs and rituals. It was Mr. Daum’s ability to do so. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually portrayed as gloomy and incomprehensible. This provided scenes of Hasidim dancing happily.
The results were not a given. Although Daum is ultra-Orthodox, he is not Hasidic himself. Also, he had previously made films about elderly caregivers, but he could not be called an experienced filmmaker.
However, he was well versed in the intricacies of the Torah, the Talmud, and the rituals of Orthodox Judaism. He spoke Yiddish, the Hasidic lingua franca, and lived in a Hasidic area. He teamed up with Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi and an experienced filmmaker, to produce and direct the documentary.
The Hasidic movement was founded in Eastern Europe in the 18th century by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov who felt that Judaism placed too much emphasis on intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and integrity. Ta.
Rudavsky said in an interview that he believes “A Life Apart” is the first full-length documentary released in American theaters that explores Hasidism.
The film, narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Sarah Jessica Parker, premiered at the Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan and Los Angeles. It then ran for five months at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema and was also shown on PBS television.
“A Life Apart explores that history with surprisingly tender family scenes, evocations of the deep mysticism of the Hasidic world, and some of the community’s most colorful and quaint features, such as formal matchmaking. and energizes the analysis,” writes Janet Maslin in a review for The magazine. New York Times.
Mr. Daum’s friendships and neighborhood acquaintances were key to the reclusive Hasidic world. Its members intentionally socially distance themselves from the secular world to avoid temptation and maintain their way of life, refusing even university education or schooling. Profession.
“When you wear a hat, it makes you look like you belong more than you actually do,” Daum told the Times before the film’s premiere. “We were able to assure them that this film was not meant to mock or exploit them.”
This film provided a critical perspective. She laments that Hasidic women think she has second-class status, and a black park worker in Brooklyn described the aloofness and “spiritual arrogance” of the Hasidim she has encountered. ” has been criticized.
Annette Insdorf, a film professor at Columbia University, said in an email that “A Life Apart” “provided a fascinating introduction to the history of Hasidic life and its enduring vibrancy.”
The film, she added, “opened my eyes to the Hasidic sense that all things, including sex, can be sacred, with an emphasis on prayer, joy, and community.” .
In his second film with Mr. Rudavsky, “Hide and Seek: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust” (2004), Mr. Daum tried to dispel his two grown sons’ contempt for non-Jews. He accompanies a camera crew and takes them to Poland, a Roman Catholic who saved the lives of his maternal grandfather Chaim Federman and his two brothers by hiding them in a trench under a haystack during the Holocaust. I went to meet the couple’s family. Inside the barn. Meeting Honorata Matuszejczyk Mucha, a member of that family, who, like her parents, risked her life to protect and provide for her three siblings, was an eye-opener for the Daum family. I was moved by what I saw.
The final scene of the film shows the Daums successfully arranging for the Mucha couple to be honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Initially skeptical, the eldest son, Tzvi Dovid, enthusiastically announces to his clan that the family has set up a scholarship fund for Mucha’s grandchildren. However, Mr Daum’s second son, Akiva, acknowledged that he had learned that there were “very good people in the world”, but insisted that the Mucha parents were “an exception to the rule”.
“The general rule of thumb is that it’s best to exclude Jews,” he says. “And maybe they’ll do it again.”
Dr. Insdorf said “Hide and Seek” proved that Daum was “a humanist for whom documentaries are not just personal records, but a means of repairing the world.”
Menachem Daum was born on October 5, 1946, in a camp for displaced persons in the town of Landsberg am Lech in Bavaria, Germany, which was then occupied by Allied forces. His refugee parents, Moshe Joseph Daum and Fela (Nussbaum) Daum, survived the German concentration camps, but each lost a spouse and son, as well as countless relatives. They married in the camp, and when their son was born, they named him Menachem, which means comforter or comforter in Hebrew.
“Apparently they were hoping that I might be able to bring some happiness back into their lives,” Daum told Religion and Ethics News Weekly in a 2001 interview.
Despite his carefulness, his mother remained angry at God, who had stood by indifferently as her infant son Avrohom was torn from her arms when they arrived at Auschwitz. Her husband, who belonged to the Hasidic Ger sect, decided that humans could not understand God’s ways and that questions about God’s sins had no answers, Daum said. I spoke inside.
The family immigrated to the United States in 1951 and was settled by HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) in Schenectady, New York, where Menachem briefly assumed the American name Martin. When he asked if he could piece together a costume for Halloween, his father worried about the effect that Gentiles would have on him in a city without a yeshiva. He soon moved his family to Borough Park. It is a region that is absorbing many of the remnants of Europe’s once large Hasidic sect, eventually becoming the most populous group in the region.
Menachem attended a local yeshiva, and after high school, spent four years in advanced Talmudic study. However, he realized that the life of a Talmudic scholar was not for him, and he began taking night classes at Brooklyn College.
“I was led to believe that there was little worth learning from outsiders,” he says in “Hide and Seek.” “I found this to be untrue. I felt that the people I met were very ethical, almost religious people who were trying to make the world a better place.”
in Educational Psychology from Fordham University in 1978. His dissertation was on aging, and for the next 25 years he worked as a research gerontologist at the New York City Bureau of Aging and the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College.
Fogelman said when Daum had to care for her mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she realized that 35 million Americans care for older adults. Intrigued by the visual power of filmmaking, he produced his first documentary, In Care of: Families and Their Seniors.
Seduced by the medium, he decided to make a second film about the tenacity of faith of Holocaust survivors. He sought out Mr. Rudavsky as an ally, and their conversations led to a focus on the Hasidic community.
To support his family while making movies, Daum often filmed wedding and bar mitzvah videos.
In addition to his two sons, Mr. Daum is survived by his wife, Rifka (Federman) Daum; daughter, Chaya Shuron; brother, Rabbi Heshi Daum; sister, Beverly Berkowitz; and grandchildren.
At the end of “Hide and Seek,” Mr. Daum says: “There used to be a Jewish tradition called tsava. When you reach a certain stage in life and realize that you won’t be able to lead your children forever, you define the most important values you want your children to uphold. , I put it in writing. It’s like a moral will. I hope that the trip I took my sons to Poland is, in a sense, my tsava for them.”
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