Between this email and the news that hundreds of volunteers had poured in to help the Shomrim, the police, and eventually even the FBI canvass Borough Park and other parts of Brooklyn, it seemed clear that the Internet was being used to mobilize an already astonishingly mobilizable ultra-Orthodox community—one already related to Orthodox communities outside of Brooklyn. Given the historically complex relationship that the fervently observant have to technology—paradoxically both early adopting and often enduringly resistant—it was hard not to feel a sense of pride and, against evidence already mounting to the contrary, a tiny sliver of hope. This community was using all available tools to do what every community was meant to do: care for its own.

Which is why I gasped yesterday when I read that investigators believe it may have been this very asset—the efficient, powerful activation of up-to-date resources—that caused the suspect in Leiby Kletzky’s murder to panic and kill the child.

I had been sure that nothing could worsen the discovery that an 8-year-old walking home alone from camp for the first time in his life, lost and surely already scared, somehow managed to stumble into the confusing, frantic world of a deeply disturbed man; but it is simply unbearable to imagine that his parents, and the scores of police officers, canvassers, and prayer-givers who sought to help the parents might be made to believe that they had, however inadvertently and with whatever great intentions, played a role in his death. The injunction at last night’s funeral, in which one speaker “reminded the community to be careful, urging the adults to protect their children from strangers,” must have stabbed the hearts of Leiby’s parents, who allowed their child a small measure of freedom with the most unthinkable of consequences. It is a lesson embedded in Orthodox life, one for which the religious are routinely dismissed as backwater provincials. Yet this morning, it is hard not to sympathize with the insular-minded. Would contracting one’s world prevent tragedies like Leiby Kletzky’s murder? Tell me where to recycle this computer.

Let me be the one to say it: This act of violence was utterly unforeseeable—the random result of a set of cascading tragic coincidences. If the picture being drawn by investigators is true, Leiby Kletzky’s parents, however ravaged by guilt they undoubtedly are at this moment, did nothing wrong, and anyone who claims otherwise is a sinner of the first order. These two adults were engaged in that delicate dynamic that turns parenting into an art: the alternating two-step of protecting a child while slowly, thoughtfully allowing him progressively wider experiences of independence. That a madman allegedly stepped into this dance was a terrible fluke—or even, if you’re so inclined, an act of God. But as far as we mortals are concerned it was not the result of the Kletzkys’ misjudgments, and their son’s murder must not be turned into an excuse for self-punishment. Trying to make sense of this story is an understandable impulse, but it is deeply misguided. And there are, without question, enough victims already.

Ha’makom yenahem etkhem betokh she’ar avelei Zion v’Yerushalayim.

7 Blocks To Walk, Brooklyn Boy Never Got Home [NYT]
Leiby Kletzky Murder Suspect Levy Aron Confesses to Authorities [ABC]
Police, Hundreds of Volunteers Search for Missing Brooklyn Boy [NY Post]

• This is what right of return actually means. [Salon]

• Justin Bieber has the name Yeshua (that would be “Jesus”) tattooed in Hebrew on his ribs. Get over it. [Yahoo!]

• This portentous “Letter to President Obama” about the peace process has the man-bites-dog signature of former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. [NYRB]

• “Your mother took off her Jewish badge, and I took off my gay badge, and we got married.” Sounds like a great new film about to open. [NYT]

• An incredible story of dissidence and violent suppression within the Hasidic community. [Forward]

This weekend, in Bethel, New York, Phish performed “Quinn the Eskimo” a few miles from where Bob Dylan recorded it. (And I was there.)

Speaking of which, Der Tzitung‘s full explanation is pretty epic. The Hasidic community, after all, embraced Clinton when she was New York’s senator for the better part of last decade. “In accord with our religious beliefs,” it explained, “we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status.” (Hrmm.) It added, “Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.”

Another Hasidic Publication Photoshops Hillary Clinton Out Of Iconic Photo [Failed Messiah]
Related: Hillary Clinton, Audrey Tomason Go Missing in Situation Room Photo in Der Tzitung Newspaper [WP]
Oops! Sorry For Erasing Hillary [Daily Beast]

One particularly interesting feature of these publications was their coverage of Hasidic life. Far more important in Warsaw, where Hasidim made up a large proportion of the population, than in New York, Hasidic news was provided by journalists who had grown up in Hasidic families or who had a foot in both the Hasidic and secular worlds, but still lived and looked like traditional Jews. With around a third of Warsaw’s 350,000 Jews claiming membership in one of the 50 or so Hasidic sects based in the city, Hasidic newsgathering became a significant component of the Yiddish press. In the wake of World War I, dozens of Hasidic rebbes made their way to Warsaw, which had become the Jewish cultural capital of Eastern Europe. Leaving their shtetls, they retained the names of their locales: from Porisov, the Porisover rebbe; from Aleksandrov, the Aleksandrover rebbe; from Ger, the Gerer rebbe; and so forth.

What follows is a small window on such Yiddish press reporting. The event in question took place in January 1926; three articles from different newspapers are condensed here:

Just as the rebbe’s home in a shtetl functioned as his office, so did his new home in the city. His disciples would come to ask advice and request divine intervention, in close proximity of other Hasidic sects and their rebbes, making inter-sect disputes far more in-your-face.

Such disputes occured for a variety of reasons: within the sects themselves, they usually had to do with rabbinical succession. Between them, anything went. Disagreements could arise over when to start praying, which nigunim (melodies) to use, or what kind of kugel to eat on Shabbos. Certain sects suffered from such long-term feuds, for example that between the Sandzer and the Sadagurer, or between the Belzer and the Munkatcher Hasidim, that nobody remembered what initially set off the antagonism. These were essentially the Hasidic variants of the Hatfield and the McCoys. It was similar with the Porisover rebbe (Yeshoshue Osher Hurvitz-Shternfeld) and the Kolibyeler rebbe (Uri Yehoshue Osher Elkhanan Ashkenazi), whose disagreement had an unknown cause that resulted in bad blood between both of their followers.

In early 1925, the Porisover, a widower, had remarried. A year later, his first child, a son, was born. In an attempt to bury the hatchet with the Kolibyeler rebbe, the Porisover rebbe invited the Kolibyeler rebbe to the newborn’s bris. Moreover, he designated the Kolibyeler to serve as his sandek, the godfather who cradles the child as the circumcision takes places and holds the child still while the mohel performs the circumcision. This was a beautiful gesture. The Porisover, however, neglected to inform his own followers of his changed attitude toward the Kolibyeler. After having no doubt heard censorious homilies from their rebbe against the evil Kolibyeler, the Porisover Hasidim were flabbergasted by his largesse and didn’t quite know how to react.

The bris was huge. Rabbis packed the Porisover’s apartment; all of Hasidic Warsaw was in attendance. Wine poured like water. The Porisover Hasidim got drunk, and courageous; protesting their rebbe’s decision to reconcile with his former arch-enemy, the Kolibyeler, they defied their leader’s call to join in the opening prayers beginning the bris ceremony.

Taking note of his followers’ silence, the Porisover rebbe then invited the Kolibyeler rebbe to recite a blessing, further infuriating the Porisovers. “Raboysay, mir veln bentshn” (“Gentlemen, let us make a blessing”), the Kolibyeler intoned. The Porisover Hasidim couldn’t take any more and met the call to prayer with hysterical laughter. Their rudeness was shocking, but given the number of celebrants and the noise, their ruckus died down and the ceremony soon continued.

One of the Porisovers chimed in with the Harakhmones section of the ceremony and was joined by his peers. But a guest, the son of the Zvoliner rebbe, refused to let their outburst pass without incident, and blurted out, “it’s more appropriate to laugh at your singing than at the Kolibyeler’s.”

Their patience already thin, the drunken Porisover Hasidim were quick to react. One particularly inebriated fellow, Avremele Gritser, stuck his face into that of the Zvoliner’s son, called him a brat, told him to shut up, and cursed him as a “villain of Israel.” (Like their clothing, Hasidic cussing is relatively modest.)

Seeing his son berated infuriated the Zvoliner rebbe, who grabbed Avremele Gritser and warned him that if he didn’t stop insulting his son, he’d get punched—twice for good measure. Gritser looked at the Zvoliner and replied, “Oh yeah? And you’ll get four punches.”

With that, the Zvoliner rebbe’s son dropped Avremele with two blazing fists.

The crowd jumped on the Zvoliner rebbe and his son, beating them mercilessly. They did what is known in Yiddish as “taking out a mortgage on someone,” which entails holding someone down with a sheet while others pummel him. This was most likely performed with the men’s prayer shawls.

Hearing the inhuman yelps of the Zvoliner father and son, neighbors came running. They rushed into the rebbe’s apartment and found the Zvoliner rebbe and his son lying immobile on the floor, their clothes torn to shreds.

The two pummeled men were dragged out of the building by a gaggle of Porisovers and thrown into the street. Only with the help of two passers-by were they put into a droshke (horse-drawn carriage) and taken home. Inside, the party continued as if nothing was amiss: the bris was completed and merry-making and dancing followed.

Shortly thereafter, the daughter of the Zvoliner rebbe burst into the apartment with a policeman. The officer asked the owner of the house, the Porisover rebbe, to step outside. His followers, however, would not allow the policeman to approach the rebbe and the daughter—described by one Yiddish press reporter as “a girl with a sharp tongue”—began to howl that her father was beaten and stomped on and that she demanded satisfaction. After a tense standoff, the Hasidim relented and the policeman returned to the station house with the names of the rebbe and the other brawlers.

The Zvoliner’s daughter told the group of Yiddish journalists that had assembled to report the story that they had not heard they end of her. She would press charges. But like many of the small, internal convulsions in the Hasidic world, this episode would ultimately be dealt with internally. Charges weren’t pressed; the incident was smoothed over. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Zvoliner rebbe didn’t at least hold a grudge.

Just a few weeks after shooting had wrapped on Night of the Living Jews, Oliver Noble, the film’s 20-year-old writer and director got the kind of publicity many young filmmakers wait half their careers for: a mention in the New York Times, albeit in the Home and Garden section. The September 2006 article centered on a small barn, built by hand just outside Woodstock, NY, by high-wire performance artist Philippe Pettit, but it quoted heavily from the outspoken woman who had sold him the wood: sawmill owner, mixed-media artist, and film producer Valerie Fanarjian. In passing, the profile mentioned her latest venture, describing it as “not just another Hasidic zombie movie.”

The premise: On the first night of Passover, poison matzo transforms a Catskills colony of Hasidic Jews into flesh-hungry, blood-thirsty killers. The only way to stop them: striking them with non-kosher food.

Since the Times article, 10 hours of footage have been edited down to a 17-minute short, and the film’s been slated to have its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival this Friday night. A rather impressive two-minute trailer—complete with gory slapstick, gratuitous nudity, catchy music, and an ominous narrator promising “the most violent and sexually explicit experience since your bris”—has been viewed more than 11,000 times on YouTube and has generated enthusiasm among horror bloggers. Johnny Butane of Dread Central gushed, “Sometimes when doing this job something comes to my attention that makes me remember why I love this genre. It’s just so fucking out there.” The film also caught the attention of Heeb editor Joshua Neuman, who signed the magazine on as producers in June; in the latest issue, they name Noble one of their Heeb 100. “They really captured the look of a 70s horror film,” says Neuman, a self-professed horror fan. The level of anticipation may be low by Hollywood standards, but it’s pretty remarkable for a short film, let alone one by a 20-year-old director no one’s ever heard of.

“My kind of motto as a filmmaker is, I want to make movies that don’t make a difference,” says Noble, a short, thin young man with a gentle demeanor. He originally had the idea for Night of the Living Jews two years ago, on a cross-country road trip along old Route 66, while assisting one of his mentors, photographer Roy Gumpel. “You’re stuck in a car for hours and hours and hours, and you just come up with crazy ideas.” Noble met Gumpel through his son, a former classmate at Mount Laurel in New Paltz, the progressive “hippie-dippie type private school” he attended until eighth grade. The next fall, he transferred to public high school in Accord, the small Hudson Valley town where he still lives with his parents. After a year, he decided to drop out and pursue filmmaking. His parents were understandably nervous at first, despite their own unorthodox career paths: Noble’s father dropped out of Yale and now owns an organic beef farm; his mother taught at Mount Laurel for 10 years and currently works as a real estate agent. But they quickly came around as Noble made began finding work as an assistant on photo shoots and film sets. (A surprising number of film professionals, including Willem Dafoe, Steve Buscemi, and Robert DeNiro, either live or spend their weekends in Hudson Valley.)

Noble says he got interested in film around age five or six, just before his family moved from New Jersey to Accord, but his parents then allowed him to see only one movie a month. Later they relaxed the limit, but still forbade R-rated films, so, Noble says, “I’d pretend to be sick, and then I’d ride my bike all the way down to the video store, which was like 4 miles off, get all the movies I wasn’t supposed to see like There’s Something About Mary, and Pulp Fiction, ride back, watch them all, then ride back the four miles to the video store before my parents got home.”

Not that Noble necessarily needed inspiration. By third grade, he’d started making movies with a school friend, Sam Falconi. Their first, shot using a friend’s father’s VHS camera, was about a king pursued by a sword-wielding assassin; since then they’ve made eight films together, including What Goes Around, about the karmic downfall of a “would-be hotshot” who moves to New York, which was featured in the 2006 Hamptons International Film Festival. That same year the two began work on Night of the Living Jews, their most ambitious project to date. In some ways, their basic sensibility hasn’t changed much since their first film. “Everyone gets killed, that how most of our movies ended for a while,” Noble said.

The two had planned to move out to Los Angeles that June, as soon as Falconi graduated high school, but on a senior trip to Disney World, Falconi says, “I had much more fun than everyone else did.” Suffice it to say, he was sent home, banned from the theme park, and forced to work until he could pay his parents back for the trip. With their L.A. plans postponed, Noble and Falconi began to brainstorm films Noble could direct and Falconi could shoot. Noble, who says he is “not an adamant fan of zombie movies, but I’ve definitely seen my fair share,” suggested Night of the Living Jews, and within a few weeks had written a draft of the script.

They kept the budget to $3,000 by using an abandoned mink coop on the Noble family’s property for the main set, buying costumes from secondhand stores in Monsey, and enlisting local film producers including Fanarjian, Gumpel, and Sam’s uncle Enrico Falconi. As zombies, they cast friends, family, and other locals, including Larry Fessenden, the indie horror director behind Wendigo, and Melissa Leo, an actress best known for her role in 21 Grams. Laurent Rejto, head of the Hudson Valley Film Commision and a cofounder of the Woodstock Film Festival, plays the zombie rabbi. “He controls the kind of group soul,” Noble explains. Annie Nocenti of the Woodstock Times visited the set on the night of Rejto’s big scene, when the rabbi (outfitted with antlers and twirling payes) gets shot with a crossbow, loaded with a bacon cheeseburger.

But most of the cast and crew members Nocenti spoke with seemed to have few reservations about dressing up as Hasidic Jews, let alone Hasidic zombies. As Charles Noble, Oliver’s father, told Nocenti, “We’re making a funny movie with no deep meaning, and we hope it’s funny enough that it isn’t hijacked by someone looking to find something offensive in it. The thought crossed my mind that this is potentially incendiary, but as long as it’s funny, it’ll be fine.”

The “potentially incendiary” nature of the concept has led some viewers of the trailer to wonder about Noble’s roots (“Man, I hope the creators of this are Jewish,” writes one blogger) and whether he has a right, of sorts, to play with Jewish stereotypes. Noble is indeed Jewish, if not religious. His familiarity with Hasidic Jews stems in part from a high school friend who used to be Hasidic, but more from a general awareness of the Hasidic communities in and around Accord, as well as nearby summer colonies.

It’s no surprise then the trouble in the film begins at a Borscht Belt bungalow colony called Moisheville, “A Kosher Community.” On the first night of Passover, a group of Hasidic Jews are “turned into flesh-eating zombies by matzo with a dark history,” then descend on “an unsuspecting gentile family,” the trailer’s deep-voiced narrator explains. The only one who can stop them is a half-Jewish, tractor-riding hero named John Leibowitz, whose own family was transformed into zombies years ago by a similar batch of evil matzo. He finds time along the way to steal the heart of the besieged family’s daughter.

The parody is gleefully over-the-top (“There are Jews on the lawn,” the father says breathlessly, “zombie Jews.”), but what’s most impressive are the production values. The movie was filmed in black and white on MiniDV, and looks remarkably professional, even if you don’t consider the age of the director. That’s judging by the trailer: Noble only finished mixing and editing the film late last week. (One catch in getting professionals to work for free is waiting for them to make time in their schedule.)

It’s the film’s provocative concept, daring and silly to some, offensive to others, that best accounts for the attention it has gotten so far and seems destined to get in the future. The film’s mix of ethnic, sexual, and physical humor echoes Roman Polanski’s hilarious 1967 occult comedy Fearless Vampire Killers. A more direct inspiration, Noble says, was William Crain’s Blacula (1972), now a camp classic, about a cursed 18th century African prince reawakened in 1970s Los Angeles. Oddly enough, Noble’s never actually seen the film. “Just seeing the trailer was enough for me,” says Noble. He has, however, partaken of countless viewings of Vampire in Brooklyn, Wes Craven’s 1995 remake, with Eddie Murphy as the undead prince.

This is not, of course, the first time that a blaxploitation film has inspired Jewish filmmakers—that would have to be The Hebrew Hammer (2003), Jonathan Kesselman’s overhyped but often clever take on Shaft, starring Adam Goldberg (a sequel is in the works). That film’s jokes are generally benign: overbearing mothers, references to the “Worldwide Jewish Media Conspiracy” and a preemptive knock at the Anti-Defamation League. Night of the Living Jews riffs on a far older, far more inflammatory, and far more persistent allegation—that Jews used the blood of Christian infants to make matzo.

The first allegation of ritual murder—known as blood libel—is generally traced to Passover, 1144, when a 12-year-old boy was found dead in Norwich, England. Since then, similar accusations have followed—in Hungary, Damascus, Kiev, and so on—resulting in pogroms, forced confessions, and executions. In 2003 Hezbollah’s satellite network Al-Manar aired a Syrian-produced series, “Al Shahat” (The Diaspora), depicting rabbis kidnapping and killing Muslim children. And early this year Ariel Toaff, a professor at Bar Ilan University, published Pasque di Sangue (Bloody Passovers) in Italy, suggesting in the book that a ritual murder alleged to have taken place in Trent in 1475 may have a historical basis; critics countered that his “proof” was based on confessions made under torture, and while Toaff initially swore to stand by his work “even if crucified,” he soon halted publication.

Noble knows some viewers will make that leap to the blood libel from the trailer, but the film itself is careful to dodge the issue. The matzo in the movie, Noble says, is created by a Nazi scientist, not baked with baby’s blood. Still, that might not satisfy viewers anxious—or eager—to find fault. Last March, someone posted the trailer on HudsonValleyParents.com, a local discussion forum, and an offended viewer forwarded it to the Jewish Federation of Duchess County. The executive director wrote back, “Although I have no doubt [this] was created in jest (probably by some very silly Jews and others) and not meant to be anti-Semitic, it is certainly in very bad taste. What its creators…are probably not aware of or thinking of, is that it comes sickeningly close to real debasement of Jews and accusations of ‘Blood Libel’.” After that message was posted on the forum, further debate ensued, with one parent writing, “Thanks for posting this…. I know it took a lot of guts to do so.” Another responded, “As a zombie, I find this trailer deeply offensive. Please remove it or I will eat your brain. Mmmm…brains.”

MyFoxNY.com, the website of a local Fox affiliate, asked a rabbi to weigh in, from a conservative synagogue in South Orange, New Jersey. “It’s disturbing and highly offensive… Some of the most virulent anti-Semites are sometimes Jewish. It’s a self-hating phenomenon.”

Noble seems concerned about the negative responses, but he knows they are far from universal. (A rabbi from Texas has already written him, hoping to set up a screening for his synagogue.) “Does anyone seriously think that someone’s going to NOT be an anti-Semite, watch this, and then be like, ‘Oh my God, the Jews!’?” Noble asks. He’s hesitant to say the movie has any specific message, but he hopes people will be savvy enough to see the short for what it is, more a parody of anti-Semitism than a perpetuation. “If anything this is going to make people see how silly it is.”

After the premiere this Friday, Noble plans to shop the film around to other festivals. He’s also planning, once again, to drive out to Los Angeles with Falconi. Finding work shouldn’t be a problem at first—Heeb has already commissioned Noble to make three short films for their website—but Noble doesn’t intend to make Jewish-themed comedies forever. He is already at work on the script for a feature-length spoof of competition films like Bring It On, and has completed a plot outline for a horror film, though he’s hesitant to reveal too many details. Whether Night of the Living Jews becomes the calling card he hopes for is yet to be seen, but it’s worth remembering that other directors have had similarly unlikely starts. After all, who would have ever guessed in 1971 that the 24-year-old director of Duel, a made-for-TV movie about a California commuter chased by an 18-wheeler, would go on to create Schindler’s List?

But while Giulietta Masina acted her belief, and convincingly too, Shuli Rand has no cause for pretending. An established Israeli actor, he left the profession in 1997 because of his increasingly devout lifestyle but, coaxed by the director Didi Gar, agreed to a comeback if certain conditions were met: No screenings on the Sabbath; kosher catering on the set; and only one woman could appear on screen with him—his wife, who’d never acted before but nonetheless gamely gave it a whirl.

The result is compelling. Rather than a condescending, reductionist exploration into the haredi community or an examination that makes them seem unrealistically righteous, Gar directs a portrait of people who are God-fearing and God-loving and flawed nevertheless. For Moshe and his wife—and perhaps for Rand, who wrote the screenplay, and his wife too—every stroke of fortune, good or ill, is a divine gift. But the vigor of belief is no protection against feelings of malice, sins of omission, and outright lies.

Ultimately, though, their sense of personal agency in the world boils down to zealousness of prayer and fidelity to God; just rewards will flow from there. It’s an understanding different from my own, yet the fear the couple sometimes feels, their hunger for an act of mercy, and the fleeting joys they get to savor too are universal and refreshing to behold.