Focus on Adass
Mint Pictures, the documentary production company responsible for ABC-TV’s Walkley-nominated “Code of Silence” which focused on Melbourne’s Yeshivah community is now turning its lenses towards Adass.
Dan Goldberg and Danny Ben-Moshe
The Sydney-based company has been commissioned by SBS to produce a one-hour documentary, opening a window into the hidden world of Melbourne’s Adass Israel community.
Centred in the midst of East St Kilda’s café culture, some of the 200 families of the Adass community will be featured in this story of a reclusive ultra-Orthodox community as it battles to maintain its age-old traditions against the subversive temptations and trappings of the modern world. Audiences will be exposed for the first time on TV to the wonderful and intriguing world of the most ultra-Orthodox Jewish subculture in Australia. It will be directed by Danny Ben-Moshe and produced by Dan Goldberg with Mint’s Adam Kay as executive producer. Production begins in 2015 and the documentary is expected to air on SBS in 2016.
The documentary is being financed by SBS, Screen Australia and Screen NSW.
Well, they’ll have to be careful how they put that together. Given the current atmosphere prevailing, ‘the wonderful and intriguing world of the most Ultra-Orthodox Jewish sub-culture in Australia’ may attract only animosity for its very singular existence. There’s gross ignorance of Jewish history and tradition in all its variety and complexity among those who are not Jewish, and that will colour their receptivity to something as idiosyncratic as this. If only there was the same knowledge about, and admiration of, Jewish civilisation, as there is for say the Greek civilisation (which has always been a positive thing to study in the eyes of so many), or even the Egyptian civilisation, or, more commonly now, the Chinese civilisation, we would be less stereotyped, less ‘feared’ for our difference (which invites rejection and violent attack through ignorance). How to do this? How to make Jewish civilisation available to all in a way that shows the beauty and intellectual rigour of it? Now there’s a thought for our esteemed leaders to have a go at doing something with.