Locked down? Open up to… ‘Shtisel’ creator Yehonatan Indursky

Stuck inside, caged behind the (slightly expanded) eruv wire of Israel’s restrictions on freedom of movement, many of us have turned inward — toward family and food, toward novels and poetry, and, we might as well admit, some television.

Over Passover my gaze was fixed on “Unorthodox” — a show that premiered on Netflix two weeks ago and is a riveting portrayal of one woman’s escape from the Satmar Hasidic community of Brooklyn to the freewheeling, history-stained city of Berlin. The show, created by Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski and based on the memoir of the same name by Deborah Feldman, requires little in the way of endorsement: it’s terrific. Watch it as soon as possible.

Amazed by Shira Haas’s bravura performance, I was reminded of her touching portrayal of Ruchami Weiss in “Shtisel” and, in turn, of the body of work of one of Israel’s great depicters of the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, world — Yehonatan Indursky, the creator of “Shtisel” and several other movies, shows, and documentaries.

A fine place to start is with his only documentary film, “Ponevezh Time,” available in most countries on Amazon Prime and Google Play. The opening scene, in the pre-dawn darkness, shows a teenage yeshiva student at his rabbi’s door. He’s come to accompany the white-bearded sage to the hall of study. The streets are dark and still. And yet the rabbi chides himself for not being the equal of his father, who used to wake at 2 or 3 a.m. every day to start studying. Once, he tells the student, on a night of driving rain, his mother hid his father’s shoes so that he would heed her advice and stay home and not make the nighttime walk to the seminary; his father, the rabbi chuckles, set out barefoot.

This anecdote offers insight into why the halls of study in Bnei Brak, where the Ponevezh Yeshiva is located, were only shuttered several long weeks after the universities in Israel closed their doors; the ethos of this school and others like it is steadfast study in the face of everything — plague, decree, the siren call of creature comforts.

Indursky, who studied at the seminary as a teen, does a wonderful job showing the spartan creed of study that prevails at the yeshiva. The spines of the volumes of Talmud and commentary are cracked and taped many times over. The boys’ grayish-white shirts balloon over their thin bodies. Many of them sleep in their clothes. Elderly teachers huddle close to electric heaters that provide only a single coil of warmth. As my wife put it, “This doesn’t look anything like Harvard.”

‘Shtisel’ co-writer Yehonatan Indursky in his Tel Aviv apartment, far from his childhood Haredi home in Givat Shaul in Jerusalem (Courtesy Sam Spiegel)

My one qualm with the film, which offers glimpses of beauty amid the bleakness, is that we hear much about the devotion to study and its toll on all other aspects of life, but we never get a sense of it. We’re told that this is the flagship yeshiva of the ultra-Orthodox world, but the rigor of the study remains elusive. Are the students, I wondered, pushed to break new ground, to question the commentary that came before them, to add new layers of understanding, to probe the sedimentary layers of logic in each Talmudic argument, or merely to memorize?

We’re left wondering.

‘The Cantor and the Sea’

After the documentary I’d suggest turning to the fictional “The Cantor and the Sea.” It’s a short film, some 25 minutes-long, about an unmarried, middle-aged cantor who arrives, along with his mother, at a seaside community to lead the High Holiday prayers.

Gedalia’s mother is neat and overbearing. Her late husband, the cantor’s father, never suffered from stage fright. Her 50-year-old son, played by Yoav Hayt, is wobbly on his first night, but he finds inspiration and maybe more in his host, Nechama (Maayan Turjeman), who lives in the apartment next door. An ebullient single mother, she tells Gedalia that she appreciated that he “didn’t cantorize” and that he just prayed from the heart. The movie carries the wisp of love; more a poem than a novel.

‘Shtisel’

From there go to “Shtisel,” available on Netflix. It’s the great cinematic novel of the haredi world. Shulem, the newly widowed patriarch, is played with a Tony-Soprano-like magnetism by Dovel’e Glickman; his sons and daughters, brother and mother, neighbors and suitors and neighborhood matchmakers all swirl around in fits of ineptitude and angst, cunning and humor, as he, a deeply flawed character, pushes ahead in the only way he knows how.

The Shtisels, father Shulem and son Akiva, at their kitchen table (Courtesy ‘Shtisel’)

In 2016 Indursky told the Times of Israel’s Jessica Steinberg that many dramas about the haredi or ultra-Orthodox world revolve around one figure’s incompatibility with that society. “The conflict is that they’re religious,” he said.

In Shtisel, the characters sin and stray in different ways, but they are deeply rooted in their world and a pleasure to watch there.

‘Autonomies’

Finally, there’s “Autonomies,” a six-part series that imagines a future in which a revolt over a draft law led to a separation between the state of Tel Aviv and the religious autonomous region of Jerusalem. The cold peace between the two sides is ruptured when the daughter of the chief rabbi — brilliantly played by Shuli Rand, the star of “Ushpizin” — learns that the child she thought she lost at birth was actually given, in the hospital, to a secular couple in Tel Aviv.

Broide, the main character, a two-bit smuggler and member of the Chevra Kadisha burial society, is one of the few people to move between the two worlds, bringing the dead, and the smuggled contraband, into the autonomous region. The rabbi, in what Times of Israel reviewer Jordan Hoffman called a performance of “tremendous authority,” sends Broide (Assi Cohen) across the lines to snatch the girl from the reviled Zionists.

‘Fill the Void’

If after all this you still want more and are looking for a woman’s perspective, finish it all off with the feature film “Fill the Void,” written and directed by American-born Israeli filmmaker Rama Burshtein. The New York Times’ then co-chief film critic, A.O. Scott, called the film “remarkable” and described it is as laced with “unfailing sensitivity and wry humor.”