GAY BEFORE G-D from page 71

In "Trembling Before
G-d," Mark, front
right, who is gay,
is shown at a
yeshiva in Israel.

Israeli schools he had loved
in Mea Shearim and B'nei
B'rak, in the Jerusalem area.
On Lag b'Omer, director
and subject davened and
danced all night long on
Mount Meron, the highes
mountain in Israel, and
watched 3-year-old chasidic boys receiving their
first haircuts at dawn. "The film began a Jewish
journey for both of us," says DuBowski.
In the movie, Mark wears a from (observant)
black coat and hat, but appears in one scene in
flamboyant women's clothing at a London gay
pride festival.
Obtaining additional interviews with gay
Orthodox Jews proved far more difficult. Devorah
initially agreed to speak to DuBowski only in a
parking lot far from her religious neighborhood.
There were clandestine meetings in borrowed
apartments or in parks with Jews who declined to
reveal their real names or telephone numbers.
Rabbis hung up on DuBowski; a former chief
rabbi of Israel called his interviewees "animalistic.'
"I was so distraught," the filmmaker says.

our Community about Homosexuality through
Outreach) program.
On Wednesday, noon-1:30 p.m., Rabbi
Greenberg will conduct a lunch and learn for
Jewish communal professionals at the Jewish
Federation of Metropolitan Detroit in Bloomfield
Township. He will speak on "What it Means to
Construct a Community with Open Doors."
MJAC can be reached at (248) 594-6522.

His Own Family

"One of the greatest sadnesses I've had in making
this film is witnessing Jewish families casting out
their own," says its director DuBowski, 30, the son
of what he describes as supportive Jewish parents.
Not that his "coming out" was easy. He did so on
the last day of summer vacation before returning to
Harvard for his sophomore year.
"My mother and I sat on the edge of the bed and
I said, 'I have something to tell you, and are you
going to love me no matter what?"' he recalls. "It
took me 45 minutes to say it, and I was crying,
nonstop."
His mother couldn't eat or sleep for the next
three days. "There were fights and talks and a lack
of information," he adds. "But there was never any
question that I was loved."
Raised in a Conservative home that emanated "a
deep love of Judaism," DuBowski, who now prays
in Orthodox synagogues, no longer knows what to
call himself in relation to Judaism's streams.
"I didn't realize this film would make me more
religious," he says.
Trembling Before G-d began after DuBowski moved
back home with his parents in the early 1990s.
"Returning to Jewish Brooklyn awakened some-
thing," says the director, whose previous efforts
include a short film, Tomboychik. There was some-

10/12
2001

74

thing, he says, about standing at Sheepshead Bay
for tashlich, the ritual purging of sins, with a virtual
"universe of Jews." There were Russians and
Syrians, modern Orthodox and unaffiliated.

A "Study Partner"

DuBowski began to wonder about Jews who were
gay and Orthodox and how they came to terms
with the Leviticus chapter that deemed their sexual
acts an "abomination."
At an International Conference of Gay and
Lesbian Jews he met Mark, a British man with
AIDS, exactly his age, who had abandoned
Orthodoxy after being kicked out of seven yeshivot.
"We became like chavruses [study partners] in a
yeshiva without walls," says DuBowski, who
brought his camera along as Mark revisited the

Validation And Rachmones

But a chasidic rebbe in Israel gave DuBowski the
strength to carry on. The rabbi greeted him with a
humble bow in his modest apartment, as a girl
made rice pudding in the next room and children
played on the outdoor balcony.
"I just started weeping," DuBowski recalls. "I
told him I had been carrying the pain of so many
Jews for so long — about Mark being sick and
David trying to change and all these people who
were unhappily married or who had been dis-
owned.
"And he showed utter rachmones [compassion].
He took my project very seriously, which validated
the film for me and made me feel that it was not a
chillul HaShem [a desecration of God's name]."
Nevertheless, DuBowski expects his ground-
breaking documentary to be controversial. After a
recent screening for 75 heterosexual Orthodox Jews

`Powerful, But Flawed; Says Critic

DAVID SACHS
Senior Copy Editor

A

dam Jesse]. is an
Orthodox therapist and
researcher in Jerusalem
who believes that, with conven-
tional psychotherapy and sup-
port, homosexuals can change
their sexual orientation.
He reviewed ii-embling Befire
G-d in the Sept. 13 Jerusalem
Post and felt that Sandi
DuBowski's film went too far in
arguing for Orthodox acceptance

of homosexual behavior.
"No one would deny the film's
wet," Jesse! writes. "DuBowski
captures the pain and loneliness
of his subjects in a series of
intense, heart-wrenching inter-
views. Those inter-
viewed desperately
miss the lifestyle,
community and fam-
ily closeness of the
traditional Orthodox
world.
"Had DuBowski
sought only to sensi-

tize us to the torment of those
torn between their religious
beliefs and their same-sex attrac-
tions, he would have performed
a valuable service.
"But Dul3owski does more
than that," Jesse! adds.

"Trembling Before G-d is

a polemic arguing that
the Orthodox communi-
ty should not just be
more accepting of people
with homosexual attrac-
tions, but that it should
also be more accepting of

