Father and Sons Separated by Belief

By DAVE KEHR

New York Times

February 6, 2004

The film makers Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky collaborated on the 1997 "A Life Apart: Hasidism in America," a sympathetic and informative documentary on Hasidim, members of the Jewish sect, many living and working in large modern cities while strictly following forms of worship developed in 18th-century Central Europe. "A Life Apart" presented Hasidism as being built on apparent contradictions: at once cosmopolitan and isolationist, full of joy and oppressed by tradition.

Now these directors have made "Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust," a documentary centered on Mr. Daum's strained but loving relationship with his sons, Tzvi Dovid and Akiva, Talmudic scholars who left their native Brooklyn to study in Israel. Mr. Daum fears his children have turned their backs on the non-Jewish world, regarding all Gentiles with suspicion bordering on hate.

Mr. Daum, who narrates the documentary and frequently lends his warm, bearish presence to the scenes he is filming, is an Orthodox Jew with a broad streak of what fundamentalists of many persuasions have become fond of denouncing as "secular humanism." He passionately believes that all men are brothers, and that all of humanity contains a touch of the divine. His sons, who look nearly identical with their black hats, scraggly beards and skeptical smiles, firmly contradict him, pointing to 1,900 years of religious persecution leading to the Holocaust.

Mr. Daum resolves to take his sons and his wife, Rifka, to Poland, the country from which his parents, Holocaust survivors, fled. (Mr. Daum was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.) Hoping to find traces of his family history, he discovers much more. His search leads him to a Polish couple, now elderly, whose family hid his wife's father and his two brothers in a hole beneath a hay barn for 28 months during the Nazi occupation, risking their own lives in the process.

The sons are moved by such compelling, living evidence of goodness in non-Jews, but neither one is ready to abandon his beliefs. Through Mr. Daum's efforts, the Polish couple receive the Righteous Among the Nations Award of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and the Daum family returns to observe the ceremony. But even while the sons express their gratitude, they cling to their separatist ideas. There may be a few good Poles, one of the young men observes, but given a chance to mount another Holocaust, "they'd probably do it again."

The outgoing manner of the elder Mr. Daum makes it easy to share his pain and disappointment before such statements. Like so many people of goodwill these days, he is confounded by the revival of ancient ethnic conflicts when technology is making the planet a much smaller place with more porous boundaries. His film, which opens today in Manhattan, offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.

Directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky

In English, Yiddish and Polish, with English subtitles

Not rated, 97 minutes