Meeting of Hearts and Minds

Two years ago, directors Uri Groder and Ohad Gal-Oz — both longtime Breslov baalei teshuvah — got together to create what would become known as the riveting documentary Od Nipagesh (We Will Yet Meet Again.) It’s built around a common Israeli reality: the bleeding wound between baalei teshuvah who’ve moved into a new world, and their families who remain in their old lives, often feeling resentful and betrayed. And as integrated as the baal teshuvah has become into mainstream chareidi life, we don’t always realize what he’s left behind. Close family — a father, mother, siblings, and sometimes children — who don’t understand what happened to him.

The idea was to search for real stories — secular siblings, parents, or children, who despite all the pain of estrangement, desired to reconnect before it would be too late. And they succeeded, they say, because as documentary producers, they’ve learned to keep themselves out of the picture. “In this genre,” says Groder, a veteran cameraman and director who founded a religious film institute, “the key is to be quiet, to remain unseen, like the proverbial fly on the wall. Our job is to make everyone else forget that they’re being filmed, to act totally naturally, as if no one were watching.”

Today, with cameras so small you sometimes have to squint to see them, it’s gotten easier for a cameraman to remain unobtrusive. But there was a risk as well for this untested social experiment. The entire project could have exploded — midway through, participants could have simply decided the pain and risk of vulnerability was too great.

Groder and Gal-Oz selected five complex, painful stories — five Israelis whose connection with someone very close to their heart was cut off because of his path to teshuvah and the resentments and hurt that accrued in its wake. The filmmakers then offered to reintroduce them to their estranged relative — on film.