The documentary A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky) was released in 1997. A 96-minute film, it was the first in-depth documentary about Hasidic Jews, members of a distinctive group within Judaism that has roots in pre-World War II Eastern Europe. Hasidism was revived after the Holocaust, with its largest communities in Brooklyn and in Israel.


A Life Apart was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and played for five months in theaters in New York and around the U.S. before being broadcast nationally on PBS stations. It was short-listed for an Academy Award and later went on to become one of Netflix’s most popular documentaries.


The film combines documentary sequences of contemporary American Hasidic life; interviews with Hasidim and others; commentary by scholars; narration; historical sequences that use archival film and photographs; and re-tellings of Hasidic tales. Shot mostly in Brooklyn, it also includes footage of Hasidim on pilgrimage to the graves of rebbes (religious leaders) in Ukraine and a Lubavitcher (Chabad) Hasidic outreach project in Moscow, in the early 1990s, soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union.


The filmmakers donated the footage shot for the film, including outtakes, to Brooklyn College. Like the finished documentary, the footage seen here (shot in 1993-1996) focuses on families and individuals affiliated with the Lubavitcher (Chabad), Ger, Bobov, Belz, and Satmar Hasidic groups, and includes scenes of family life; Jewish ritual events, such as weddings and other life-cycle events, visits to cemeteries, celebrations of holidays, dedication of schools, and Holocaust commemorations; and mass gatherings with leaders of significant Brooklyn Hasidic dynasties.


The footage was digitized and cataloged in 2021-2022 under a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).


Note on transliteration: this footage includes Yiddish and Hebrew foreign words and terms, spoken on camera and/or appearing in the descriptions of each tape. Words that are part of the English-language lexicon have been rendered by the cataloger as they are spelled in Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries. Names of existing organizations are spelled the way those organizations currently spell their names. No single orthographical scheme has been followed for other words and terms. Instead, an effort has been made to spell them to enable English-speakers to more easily guess how they should be pronounced. Some words, such as “ba’al teshuvah,” have been spelled the way they are most commonly spelled in English-language books and media. (All spellings in descriptions may be different from those that appear in Library of Congress subject headings.)