‘Shtisel’ spin-off ‘Kugel’ richly portrays a diasporic Hasidic community
The creators even hired members of the Antwerp Jewish community, nonactors, to provide authentic local flavor
Nuchem Shtisel (played by Sasson Gabai) paying a shiva call to Penina Baumbach (Rotem Abuhab) Courtesy of Izzy
By Rukhl Schaechter March 6, 2025
When I visited the Jewish community of Antwerp 15 years ago, three things stood out for me.
First, Haredi Jews traveled everywhere on bicycles — something I had never seen in my hometown of New York. Second, people were so outgoing, they didn’t hesitate to invite my husband and me for a Shabbos meal, even though they didn’t know us. And finally, when I asked strangers on the street for directions in Yiddish, they didn’t bat an eye and answered me — in Yiddish.
The unique, heymish (down-to-earth) atmosphere of the Belgian city’s Orthodox community is marvelously captured in the new Israeli fictional television drama Kugel. A spin-off of the international hit Shtisel, the eight-episode series is now running on the Jewish streaming platform Izzy.
Kugel, which was written and directed by Shtisel co-creator Yehonatan Indursky, tells the backstory of Nuchem — the divorced brother of the former show’s protagonist, Shulem Shtisel — before he came to Israel to seek a match for his daughter, Libi.
In the show, we not only see Hasidim riding their bikes; we also get a peek (albeit a fictional one) into the diasporic, close-knit Haredi community of Antwerp, warts and all. Indursky hired actual members of the community — nonactors — for some of the smaller roles, thereby providing some authentic local flavor.
The year is 2013. Nuchem (Sasson Gabai) is a warm, gregarious jewelry dealer who often engages in unsavory business practices. We learn early on that part of what motivates his reckless ambition is his desperate desire to fit in. When he discovers, for example, that his request to join an exclusive sauna (a schvitz or bod in Yiddish) has been rejected, he is visibly shocked and hurt. After failing to convince the man at the reception desk that he’s “worthy” of membership — a scene that seems almost Kafkaesque in its absurdity — he mumbles a Yiddish profanity and leaves.
It’s precisely this absurdity that defines Kugel’s uniqueness. In the traditional Jewish life of the shtetl, the shvitz was actually nothing more than a public bathhouse where Jewish men would cleanse themselves on Friday afternoon, right before shabbos. Since no bathers had their clothes on, the shvitz was actually one of the few places where social status was irrelevant. As we say in Yiddish: In bod zenen ale glaykh (in a sauna, everyone is equal).
The irony of turning shvitz membership into a coveted measure of success is one of the brilliant ways in which Kugel portrays the contemporary community of Antwerp — while at the same time winking to the audience.
As the main character of the show, Nochem embodies this paradoxical reality. On the one hand, he’s a swindler, asking widows to pay for expensive jewelry, supposedly ordered by their late husbands for them (which they didn’t). But surprisingly, as he pays his respects to one of these widows, Penina Baumbach (played by Rotem Abuhab), whose late husband’s restaurant served Nuchem’s favorite kugel, Nochem does something very different. Displaying a string of pearls that her husband had supposedly ordered for her, Nochem says that they were already paid for, meaning, of course, that he is now paying for the pearls out of his own pocket, without her even knowing.
The irony of this encounter is that, according to the Torah, giving someone something of value without the recipient’s knowledge that he himself paid for it, is considered one of the highest levels of generosity. So, yes, Nochem is a con artist, but at the same time one who engages in true chesed (acts of kindness).
In keeping with the Antwerp atmosphere, much of the dialogue in Kugel takes place in Yiddish. Gabai does a great job, pronouncing the Yiddish correctly, using the proper intonation. This is rather remarkable, considering that Sasson isn’t a native speaker. Born in Baghdad, his family spoke Jewish-Arabic and moved to Israel when he was 3 years old.
“My father had a grocery store and we kids helped out, so I used to listen to the customers speaking all sorts of languages, including Yiddish, and my ear got used to the tune of it,” Gabai told me in an interview. “And anyway, I love to master the language, to make the listener believe it’s my language.”
Shalom Eisenbach, who served both as a Yiddish dialogue coach and adviser on Haredi cultural details for both Shtisel and Kugel, said that Gabai took his Yiddish lines very seriously. “He would record me saying the lines, and then for two or three months I’d see him walking around on the street or at home, listening to the recording and repeating the lines.”
For Gabai, speaking Yiddish took lots of work and dedication. But some of the other actors are clearly native speakers. The legendary Israeli actress Rivkah Michaeli, who plays the wealthy widow Madam Feintouch, is one of them. She has even appeared in productions of the Israeli Yiddish theater, Yidishpiel.
Another obvious Yiddish speaker is Joseph Katz, who plays her husband, Avrum Mordkhe. Katz is actually one of the Antwerp nonactors that were selected to appear in the show. Sitting behind Nochem in the shtibl (small synagogue) before services and leisurely smoking a thin cigar, he urges Nochem in Yiddish to get him a pair of the best quality earrings for his wife. As he laughs heartily in reaction to a witty comment Nochem has made and exclaims, “Di bist a rizn vitsler, di!” (“You’re a real joker, aren’t you?”), his Yiddish just rolls off the tongue.
As Eisenbach explained, there was a lot of improvising on the set regarding which Yiddish expressions to use. Simply relying on a professional Yiddish translator wouldn’t do, he said. In fact, there were many moments during rehearsals of both Shtisel and Kugel where he thought the Yiddish didn’t sound natural. “Me darf makhn a yidish vos redt zikh,” he said (“we need to use Yiddish that flows naturally”). So when Nochem is asked how things are going for him, instead of responding “Nisht azoy gut,” (“Not so great”), he uses the more lively expression: “Nisht azoy ay-ay-ay.”
For Shtisel fans who’ve been waiting for another television series that depicts the members of a Hasidic community as real people rather than one-dimensional caricatures, Kugel really delivers. It tells a story filled with subtle cultural references and the witty irony of the Eastern European Yiddish tradition and, just as Shtisel did during its three seasons, draws us into the day-to-day lives of people in a Hasidic community as if these were our next-door neighbors.
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