The High Holy Days in Jewish cinema

When cinema was still in its youth, Hollywood built a story around the High Holy Days. Its tale was a measure of Jewry’s ties to tradition, but also a gentle sign of its loss.

In “The Jazz Singer” (1927), America’s first feature-length sound film, Jakie Rabinowitz is a cantor’s son whose father expects him to follow tradition and stand by his side to chant Kol Nidrei. But as the eve of Yom Kippur approaches, the father is told that 12-year-old Jakie is singing in a saloon. The cantor angrily fetches him home and gives him a thrashing. Jakie vows to leave home for good. As the father chants Kol Nidrei at shul, the son takes to the streets and embarks on a life singing jazz.

Years later, his career on the rise, his name now changed to Jack Robin (played here by the great Al Jolson, whose life had inspired the story), he visits his parents on his father’s 60th birthday, announces he’ll soon be starring on Broadway and hopes to make peace with his folks. Jack’s mother welcomes him back eagerly, but his father orders him to leave. Then, the cantor grows ill and hovers between life and death. Jack’s mother appears at the Broadway rehearsals and begs him to sing Kol Nidrei in place of his father. But Yom Kippur is also the show’s opening night. The film constructs a virtual morality play around this dilemma.

I won’t tell you the outcome, but the film would be incomplete without a Jolson version of Kol Nidrei. It sounds like Kol Nidrei – but in Jolson’s handling, the Aramaic-language lines are radically abridged and repeated, in effect, Kol Nidrei as jazz. The film portrays the passing of tradition into a creatively eroded form – symbolic of what New World Jews have done with the old.

In 1937, Jews in Poland did a film version of S. Ansky’s (pseudonym for Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) acclaimed Yiddish play, “The Dybbuk.”  In the film, two Hasidic Jews, Sender and Nisn, are longtime friends who meet infrequently during holiday pilgrimages to the Rebbe of Miropolye. Once,  they pledge their yet-unborn children in marriage. Soon after, Nisn is drowned and Sender, preoccupied with money, forgets his promise.

Years later, an impoverished scholar, Khonen, makes his way to Brinitz, Sender’s town, where, as a Sabbath guest at Sender’s, he instantly falls in love with Sender’s daughter Leah, who loves him in return. The father, unaware that Khonen is the son of his long-departed friend, is determined to betroth Leah to the richest suitor he can find. Desperate to win Leah’s hand, Khonen immerses himself in kabbalistic magic so he can conjure up barrels of gold. Intensely ascetic, Khonen grows ever more unbalanced, and when Leah’s engagement to a rich man’s son is announced, he calls on Satan for help, then keels over and dies. When Leah is later about to be married, she becomes possessed by her dead lover’s spirit. Her father takes her to Miropolye, where he petitions the rabbi to exorcise the wayward soul.

The film, one of the last great cultural products of Polish Jewry, is a rich portrait of pre-modern Jewish life and custom. It opens with an impassioned sermon by the rabbi on the youthful days of the fathers-to-be. The sermon deals with the Yom Kippur ministrations of the High Priest in ancient times – if an impure thought were to enter his mind in the Holy of Holies, “the entire world would be destroyed.” The rabbi compares this to the precarious journey of some unfortunate souls, who pass through several lifetimes (these Jews believed in reincarnation) in striving toward their source, the Throne of Glory – only to be cast down, just as they reach celestial heights. As this point in the sermon, Sender and Nisn inopportunely try to inform him of their pact.

When, a generation later, Khonen fantasizes a union with his beloved Leah, he refers to it as “the Holy of Holies.” In retrospect, the sermon becomes a prophecy of Khonen’s disastrous fall. But “The Dybbuk” never ceases to exalt the lovers’ bond, though the rabbi and his court try their best to undo it. The holiest moment of Yom Kippur, though fraught with catastrophe, remains a symbol for the resistance of these lovers to a world enslaved by money and class.

A third film, Barry Levinson’s “Liberty Heights” (1999), is a nostalgic comedy about growing up Jewish in 1950s Baltimore, Md. It both opens and closes on Rosh Hashanah, when the Kurtzman family customarily attend synagogue. Nate Kurtzman (Joe Mantegna) has his own New Year custom of exiting early from shul to stroll to the nearby Cadillac showroom, where the coming year’s models are on display. Each year, Nate trades in his Caddy for a spiffy new one, which he can afford – not from fading profits of the burlesque house he owns, but because of his thriving illegal numbers racket. Nate is otherwise a solid citizen, a devoted husband and father, who has raised himself up from humble origins and, in his youth, proven himself a scrappy fighter against neighborhood anti-Semites.

Most of the film deals with the adventures of Nate’s sons, Van and Ben (Adrien Brody and Ben Foster, respectively) and their relations with gentile girls.

Levinson’s framing the story inside the Jewish New Year and Nate’s Cadillac ritual is important. The Kurtzmans are nominally observant Jews – perhaps even Orthodox, but in a laid-back, assimilated way. Though Nate’s wife shows remnants of clannishness, the Kurtzmans are open to the winds of change.

While both the New Year and the “new car year” are equally important to Nate, their overlap seems a portrait of the tradition’s loosening grip since the days of “The Jazz Singer.”

Even “The Dybbuk,” flawless as its command of pre-modern tradition had been, was the creation of Jewish moderns: playwright Ansky had been a secularist and socialist revolutionary, folklorist, and humanitarian activist. The film’s creators were immersed in avant-garde theater and Expressionist idioms, and director Mihał Waszyski was a gay man who had left behind his Orthodox background and pretended he knew no Yiddish. But what unites these three films is not just their deep awareness (hidden in “The Dybbuk”) of the secular world, but also their willingness to invoke tradition as a yardstick. The High Holidays might be a site of fading cultural memory, but the theme still strikes a responsive chord among filmgoers, Jewish and gentile alike.

Joel Rosenberg teaches film and Judaic studies at Tufts University. His articles on the cinema of Jewish experience have appeared in various journals and collections.