Menachem Daum was not your typical Orthodox Jewish filmmaker
In his films, the late director strove to find common ground between Jews and non-Jews, especially Catholic Poles.
A scene in Yiddish of a Hasidic family celebrating Purim. Courtesy of Oren Rudavsky
By Rukhl Schaechter January 27, 2026
Menachem Daum (1946-2024) was not your typical Orthodox Jewish filmmaker. In his work, the late director often strove to find common ground between Jews and non-Jews, Orthodox and secular Jews, Polish Catholics and Jews (which he wrote about in these pages) and even between Palestinians and Holocaust survivors.
Fordham University is hosting a free retrospective of his films at Lincoln Center in New York. Called “Hidden Sparks,” the retrospective kicks off with Daum’s 1997 work A Life Apart: Hasidism in America — the first in-depth documentary portrait of Hasidim in New York City, produced and directed by an insider who knew the community intimately. The film is narrated by Leonard Nimoy.
In the documentary, we see a grandfather chatting in Yiddish with his children and grandchildren at home on Purim; a lively scene at the local butcher’s, and a young African-American’s unexpected reaction to a group of Hasidic men engaged in the tashlikh ritual in Brooklyn.
The film will be followed by a panel discussion that includes anthropologist Ayala Fader; filmmaker Oren Rudawsky (Daum’s frequent co-producer and co-director) and Daum’s wife, Rifke Daum.
On Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, Fordham will also host a screening and discussion of Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance after the Holocaust — a documentary that follows Daum as he travels with his two grown sons to the Polish village of Dzialoszyce to track down the Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis.
What’s fascinating about the film is the obvious reluctance of his sons, married yeshiva students, to go on the trip at all, poking fun at their father’s liberal attitude towards the Poles — and then seeing their reaction when they finally meet the now-aging children of those farmers.
As Oren Rudavsky put it: “A Life Apart was our attempt to humanize Haredim for outsiders. Hiding and Seeking is our attempt to humanize outsiders to the Haredim.”
The post-screening discussion for Hiding and Seeking will include the Polish-born historian Natalia Aleksiun, filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, and Daum’s son, Tzvi Dovid Daum. To register for the film, go here.
The retrospective also includes the 2026 film The Ruins of Lifta (2016), a documentary centered around the only Arab village abandoned in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that wasn’t destroyed or repopulated. It will be followed a week later by a conversation with Israeli historian Hillel Cohen about the legacy of The Ruins of Lifta.
There will also be a screening of portions of Menachem Daum’s unfinished film Memory Keepers, about a group of non-Jews — mostly Christian Poles — working to restore and preserve Jewish cemeteries in Poland.
The film retrospective, which takes place at the McNally Amphitheater in Manhattan, runs from Jan. 27 — Feb. 17. For more information and to register, go here.
