Fate of the apostate

Leaving the Fold documents the lives
of those Hasidim who bail on their faith

STRIKING OUT ON THEIR OWN: The Riven brothers

by MATTHEW HAYS

Eric Scott insists he didn’t actually want to make his latest documentary. The Montreal-based filmmaker says the reason not to do it was simple. “Here was another Jewish theme. I had a deep fear of being pigeonholed as a director only interested in Jewish topics.”

Scott’s first film, Je me souviens, chronicled Quebec’s thorny history of anti-Semitism, while his second, The Other Zionists, looked at mistreatment of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints. Both won him solid reviews and varying degrees of ire for the points he was making.

While making The Other Zionists, one of the people involved with subtitling the film told him about a Hasidic Jew she knew in Israel who had left his religion—and by extension his entire family—behind. Scott would learn that there was even an organization there, called Hillel Open Gates (no association with Hillel, the campus Jewish organization), which helped Hasidim who decided they wished to leave the lifestyle behind and become more secular. So began his investigative journey into ex-Hasidim, which has become Leaving the Fold, which had its premiere to sold-out houses at the World Film Festival last week.

“I was moved by many of the stories I heard,” Scott recalls. “One young man who had left the fold learned that his sister had died. But his parents banned him from attending her funeral. He was essentially dead to the family because he was no longer Hasidic.”

Scott’s contact with ex-Hasidim began in Jerusalem, but he also found ex-Hasidim in the U.S. and Montreal, where a large Hasidic community exists, primarily in Mile-End and Outremont. (Hasidic Judaism came about in the 18th century, when a group of Jews in Eastern Europe felt that the Jewish faith had grown too academically oriented and was not focused enough on spirituality and joy.)

Making contact with courage

Despite the initial breakthrough in terms of contact, Scott reports that finding people to talk to him about leaving this fold was particularly tricky. “They don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages,” he says. “Hasidim view people who’ve left with great horror and embarrassment. In Israel, there is an organization specifically set up for people who’ve left. But in Montreal, the contact we made was sort of a fluke. It was a friend of a friend of a friend.”

After meeting with these young ex-Hasid brothers Levi and Hudi Riven, Scott knew he needed to take the next step, and that would be to meet up with the still-Hasidic father. He did, and he found the religious man to be very welcoming and friendly. But the first thing the Hasidim wanted to do was to meet Scott’s family. So Scott brought his wife and children over, and they became friends. “We got to know each other, and this was very important to establish trust between us.”

Scott says the main thing that impressed him was the resolute courage many of those who left the Hasidic community had. “This was very profound. It’s about their entire sense of self. They were willing to face completely uncertain futures. In Israel, they don’t speak modern Hebrew, only Yiddish. And they don’t learn any math. To walk away from the fold takes tremendous bravery.”

And in Montreal, “the vast majority of the community has only superficial contact with the non-Hasidim. They’re not like the Amish or Hutterites, who live in isolated communities. That made them all the more interesting to me. They are living their own lives here, but in the heart and soul of one of the funkiest cities in North America. They still manage to remain apart from the mainstream population.”

Scott says the Hasidic community faces unique challenges as well: they are very identifiably Jewish, at a time when international tensions are rising due to the Mideast mess. “When I walk around my neighbourhood, I could be mistaken for Greek or Italian. Not the Hasidim. And it’s ironic that the Hasidim might bear the brunt of anti-Israeli anger, given that many Hasidim are anti-Zionist.”

But while Scott was focusing his camera on a distinctive community, he worked to bring Leaving the Fold back to the universal. “On some level, this is about a disagreement between parents and their children. And then it’s about reconciling those differences. I feel like that’s something everyone can relate to on some level.”

LEAVING THE FOLD OPENS AT
CINÉMA DU PARC ON FRIDAY, SEPT. 5

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