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Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital close to his house in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.
His dying was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a buddy and the creator of a ebook about Christian rescuers of Jews in the course of the Holocaust. She mentioned Mr. Daum had been handled for congestive coronary heart failure.
What made the documentary, “A Life Aside: Hasidism in America,” so hanging was Mr. Daum’s capacity to get individuals who scorn motion pictures and tv units to sit down on digital camera for revealing interviews, permitting him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The ensuing movie provided a fancy portrait of a spiritual group often depicted as somber and impenetrable; right here it provided scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.
That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, although ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And though he had earlier made a movie about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.
However he was properly versed within the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an skilled filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to provide and direct the documentary.
The Hasidic motion was based within the 18th century in Jap Europe by a rabbi often known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized mental qualities to the detriment of religious fervor and sincerity.
Mr. Rudavsky mentioned in an interview that he believed “A Life Aside” was the primary feature-length documentary launched in American theaters that explored Hasidism.
The movie, narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Sarah Jessica Parker, premiered on the Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan and in Los Angeles. It later ran for 5 months on the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and was proven on PBS tv.
“‘A Life Aside’ enlivens its historical past and evaluation with surprisingly tender household scenes, with evocations of the Hasidic world’s deep mysticism, and with a number of the group’s most colorfully quaint options, like formal matchmaking,” Janet Maslin wrote in her evaluation in The New York Instances.
Mr. Daum’s friendships and his familiarity along with his neighborhood had been the important thing to unlocking the reclusive Hasidic world, whose members intentionally wall themselves off socially from the secular world to keep away from its temptations and to maintain their lifestyle, spurning even school educations and education within the professions.
“If I placed on a hat, I appear to be I belong much more than I do,” Mr. Daum informed The Instances earlier than the movie’s premiere. “I might guarantee them that this movie wouldn’t mock or exploit them.”
The movie provided vital views. A Hasidic lady laments what she sees as her second-class standing, and a Black parks worker in Brooklyn condemns what he says is the aloofness and “religious vanity” of the Hasidim he has encountered.
Annette Insdorf, a professor of movie at Columbia College, mentioned in an e-mail that “A Life Aside” “offered a riveting introduction to the historical past of Hasidic life, in addition to its enduring vibrancy.”
The movie, she added, “opened my eyes to the Hasidic sense that each one issues may be sacred — together with intercourse — with an emphasis on prayer, pleasure and group.”
In his second movie with Mr. Rudavsky, “Hiding and Searching for: Religion and Tolerance After the Holocaust” (2004), Mr. Daum tried to leaven his two grown sons’ scorn for non-Jews. Accompanied by a digital camera crew, he took them to Poland to satisfy the household of the Roman Catholic couple who had saved the lifetime of their maternal grandfather, Chaim Federman, in the course of the Holocaust by hiding him and his two brothers in a dugout beneath piles of hay in a barn. An encounter with a member of that household, Honorata Matuszezyk Mucha — who had risked her life, as had her mother and father, to shelter and feed the three brothers — left the Daum household visibly moved.
The movie’s remaining scenes present the Daums efficiently arranging for the Muchas to be honored as “the righteous among the many nations” on the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The initially skeptical elder son, Tzvi Dovid, enthusiastically proclaims to the clan that his household has arrange a scholarship fund for the Mucha grandchildren. However Mr. Daum’s youthful son, Akiva, whereas admitting that he “realized there’s some superb folks on this planet,” maintains that the Muchas and Mrs. Mucha’s mother and father had been “exceptions to the rule.”
“The overall rule of thumb was, to do away with the Jew is the most effective factor to do,” he says, “and so they’d most likely do it once more.”
Dr. Insdorf mentioned “Hiding and Searching for” demonstrated that Mr. Daum was “a humanist for whom documentaries usually are not merely private chronicles, however a way to restore the world.”
Menachem Daum was born on Oct. 5, 1946, in a displaced individuals camp within the Bavarian city of Landsberg am Lech in what was then Allied-occupied Germany. Each his refugee mother and father, Moshe Yosef Daum and Fela (Nussbaum) Daum, had survived German focus camps, however they every misplaced a partner and a son, in addition to numerous different relations. They married within the camp, and after they had a son, they named him Menachem, which implies comforter or consoler in Hebrew.
“Apparently, they hoped I’d be capable to restore some happiness of their lives,” Mr. Daum informed Faith and Ethics Newsweekly in a 2001 interview.
His mom, although observant, remained indignant at God for standing by indifferently as her toddler son Avrohom was torn from her arms when she arrived at Auschwitz. Her husband, who belonged to the Ger sect of Hasidim, determined that people can’t perceive God’s methods and that questions on God’s culpability had no solutions, Mr. Daum mentioned in “Hiding and Searching for.”
The household emigrated to the USA in 1951 and was settled by HIAS (initially the Hebrew Immigrant Assist Society) in Schenectady, N.Y., the place Menachem fleetingly took the American title Martin. When he requested if he might patch collectively a Halloween costume, his father turned involved in regards to the Gentile influences on him in a metropolis that lacked yeshivas; he quickly moved the household to Borough Park. It was a neighborhood that was absorbing lots of the remnants of Europe’s once-teeming Hasidic sects, who ultimately got here to be the neighborhood’s most populous group.
Menachem attended native yeshivas and, after highschool, spent 4 years in superior Talmud research. However he realized that the lifetime of a Talmudic scholar was not for him, and he began night lessons at Brooklyn School.
“I had been led to consider that there was little of worth to be realized from outsiders,” he says in “Hiding and Searching for.” “I found this to be unfaithful. The folks I met struck me as extraordinarily moral, and virtually spiritual of their efforts to make the world a greater place.”
In 1978, he obtained a doctorate in academic psychology from Fordham College. His dissertation was on getting old, and for the following 25 years he labored as a analysis gerontologist for New York Metropolis’s Division of Growing old and the Brookdale Heart on Growing old at Hunter School.
Based on Ms. Fogelman, when Mr. Daum needed to take care of his mom after she was identified with Alzheimer’s illness, he found that there have been 35 million Individuals caring for older folks. Intrigued by the visible energy of filmmaking, he made his first documentary, “In Care of: Households and Their Elders.”
Beguiled by the medium, he determined to make a second movie, on the tenacity of religion amongst Holocaust survivors. He sought out Mr. Rudavsky as a collaborator, and their conversations led to a concentrate on the Hasidic group.
To help his household whereas making his movies, Mr. Daum typically shot movies of weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Along with his two sons, Mr. Daum is survived by his spouse, Rifka (Federman) Daum; a daughter, Chaya Schron; a brother, Rabbi Heshy Daum; a sister, Beverly Berkowitz; and grandchildren.
On the finish of “Hiding and Searching for,” Mr. Daum observes: “There was a Jewish custom referred to as a Tsava. Whenever you reached a sure stage in your life and also you realized you weren’t going to be round endlessly to information your youngsters, you’ll take an important values that you simply needed them to dwell by and you’ll commit them to a doc, type of like an moral will. I hope that the journey I took my sons to Poland on, in a method, I hope they see that as my Tsava to them.”
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