How the Creator of ‘Shtisel' Fled His Ultra-Orthodox Life — and Returned

New York Times

27-02-2025

Yehonatan Indursky showed me around Ponevezh Yeshiva one evening in January. Known in Israel as 'the Harvard of yeshivas,' Ponevezh sits perched on a hill above the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak. We stood at the back of its vast central study hall. Hundreds of white-shirted teenagers and young men packed the room, hugging the lecterns where their leather-bound Talmudic volumes lay open, the holy texts close to their chests, as if the ancient words could be absorbed not only by their minds but also by their bodies.
Two decades ago, Indursky was one of them. Tzitzit, the specially knotted tassels a reminder of his relationship with God, dangled at his hips. He was eager to have me see this exalted school, where he had lived and studied. But certain things didn't look exalted. Except for the gilded aron kodesh, the structure where the Torah scroll is housed, the main study hall was unadorned. The bulbs were bare, maximizing their harsh fluorescent light. The floors of a corridor and study nook were strewed with litter. On the grounds outside, we passed a decrepit refrigerator sitting like forgotten junk. The Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Indursky said, 'are less conscious of superficial things.' Even the dishevelment held spiritual devotion.
At Ponevezh, Indursky had dedicated himself to the Torah and Talmud during nearly all his waking hours. But then, when he was 18, he fled the yeshiva. He fled his family. He shed his kipa and high-sitting wide-brimmed black hat. He cut off his payos, the long sacred locks that grew from his temples.
He fled — and eventually created 'Shtisel,' a television series delving into the world he abandoned, a deeply layered portrait of a Jerusalem family cloistered within Haredi society. And though its niche subject, delicate stories and quiet tone might have doomed it to drift into oblivion, the show was a hit when it debuted in Israel in 2013. For the first of its three seasons, it won 11 Israeli Television Academy Awards, including for best drama series and best drama screenplay. In Israel, The Forward reported, 'Shtisel' was everywhere: 'Huge billboards featuring the show's bearded and side-locked characters popped up in secular Tel Aviv, a city where it's more usual to see images of bikini-clad supermodel Bar Refaeli looming over the freeway.'
In the United States, the show was a surprise phenomenon when Netflix brought it here five years later. What came to be known as 'Shtisel mania' spread across Jewish communities throughout the country; a pair of events at the Streicker Center at Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in Manhattan, sold out within hours, drawing more than 4,500 fans.
In both countries, the show's devotees included the Haredi. Despite the ultra-Orthodox ban on television and the blocks installed on their devices to prevent most internet access, many found a way to watch the series. Rigidly isolated as the Haredi are, Indursky said, there are always people in the community ready to assist with working around media restrictions. Indursky's father, a retired copy editor of religious texts, told me that when 'Shtisel' appeared, he was asked by a worshiper at his Jerusalem synagogue, 'What is it with your son that he does shame to the community?' But this was the minority view. 'The Haredi were excited,' Indursky's father said. 'A lot of people asked could I get them CDs.'
The show, revolving around the fraught bond between a teacher at a Haredi primary school and his grown son, a fledgling painter, stood in contrast to simplistic secular preconceptions about Haredi society and indictments like Deborah Feldman's best-selling memoir, 'Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.' In 'Shtisel,' the culture might be severely constraining and the characters often thwarted, yet all was depicted with great attention to detail and something akin to reverence.
Now, 'Shtisel' has given rise to a new series, 'Kugel,' about a branch of the same family, led by a charming swindler, a 'holy charlatan,' as Indursky describes him. The show has just received rave reviews in Israel and airs starting Feb. 28 in the United States on Izzy, a streaming service for Israeli television and film. Indursky, who once wrenched himself away from his Haredi world, has focused on it obsessively in his writing.
But his work is not his only homecoming. As we walked through Ponevezh, he wore a kipa and black hat and a particular type of black frock coat. He has a thick ginger-gray beard and has regrown his payos. He goes to shul three times daily. For his morning prayers, he straps on tefillin, leather boxes containing hand-scribed biblical verses, to his forehead and left arm. On Friday evenings, for the Sabbath, he drapes his tall, slender frame in a long, elaborately embroidered black garment, a bekishe, as many ultra-Orthodox men do. After around 20 years away, he has become Haredi again.
These days, Indursky leads a somewhat bifurcated life. During the week we spent together, he huddled with one of his editors in a crowded Tel Aviv cafe, where he was the only patron in Haredi garb, though, that morning, he sported a non-Haredi flourish, a paisley-patterned gray-and-black scarf. He and his wife choose to live in Tel Aviv because of the city's cultural liberalism, but one afternoon when he needed to have his prayer shawl cleaned, we drove half an hour to a Haredi cleaners in Bnei Brak, where, he said, they know how to iron and fold the shawl properly. Indursky lives in two worlds, but whether he is discussing locations for his next series or davening in ultra-Orthodox shuls, he is in search of an essential element of the Jewish soul and in search of God.
From early on, Indursky was a committed and ambitious, if daydreamy, student of the Torah and Talmud, and at 15, he applied to Ponevezh. The yeshiva mostly serves the Litvak, the branch of ultra-Orthodoxy to which his family belongs, a branch with an especially intellectual, scholarly approach to faith. He was coming out of a pre-yeshiva day school in Jerusalem, where one of his former teachers told me that it is thanks to the breath of students, thanks to their collective exhalations as they talk about Talmudic passages with their study partners, that the world still survives.
Climbing Ponevezh's front steps for his first day, Indursky imagined becoming a rabbi of historic importance, a sage whose portrait people hang on their walls. But, he said, as we gazed across the yeshiva's main hall with its sea of students, his excitement and expectations soon dimmed: 'My feeling was that there is no me.' Then as now their animated voices, as they debated rabbinical commentaries with their partners, merged into a din verging on a roar. He felt that he was diminishing and disappearing amid all the fervor of his peers, all their sameness.
Indursky's sense of vanishing was relentless; over the next two and a half years, isolation and desolation set in. A roommate who was also struggling led him to a public library just beyond Bnei Brak. 'I saw on a table a large book with a blue cover,' he said. 'Rachel Bluwstein's poems.' Indursky knew nothing of secular poetry. Bluwstein, a Russian émigré and Zionist pioneer in the early 20th century, was a revelation. That her poetry managed to communicate her private pain so movingly inspired him to try some sparsely worded verses of his own. It was an initial, minimal step in his flight. 'The Haredi like to call the yeshiva the Noah's ark for our times,' he said. 'Outside, there is a flood, and if you will not stay inside, you will be lost in the water.' He added, 'You can call it Noah's Ark, but you can also call it a prison.'
We left the main hall and stood on a terrace, where I remarked on the lights of Tel Aviv, floating not far in the distance. 'They looked very far away,' Indursky recalled of that time. But one day, at a pay phone, he dialed the number of an organization, Hillel (no relation to the U.S. campus network of the same name), which helps ultra-Orthodox Israelis leave their insular existences. He took a bus from Bnei Brak to Tel Aviv, where Hillel was headquartered, and passed an evaluation to affirm that he was making a clearheaded decision. He received new clothes and a temporary place to stay. A Hillel volunteer — a woman of around 40 who, in Indursky's memory, held a kind of seductive if nonsexual sway over him — coached him in writing a letter to his parents, declaring that he no longer believed in God, that he was beginning his new secular life. One morning, he was driven to a Tel Aviv address where Hillel had found him a permanent room in an apartment shared by ex-Haredi. Getting out of the car, he heard a woman's cry from yards away.
'Yoni!' his mother called out. 'Yoni, come! You don't need to go with them. You have nothing to do with them.' Indursky's letter hadn't yet reached his parents, but a Haredi organization that opposed Hillel had tipped them off about their son's flight and, possibly through an informer within Hillel, about exactly where he would be that morning.
'Come with no kipa!,' she begged. 'There is nothing you will not be able to do in our home. We love you. Anything you want you can do in our home. Come with us!'
'It is written in the Talmud,' his father told me, 'that the son of a man is like his leg. If a son starts to do problems, some say, you have no place in this home. But we were thinking, when a man has problems in his leg, he will not put his leg in the garbage. He will do everything, no matter what, to make his leg OK, so his leg will stay with him.'
Indursky agreed to go with his parents and live in their apartment in Givat Shaul, an ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood, if they truly let him renounce his religion. He was still being guided by Hillel. In Tel Aviv, the seductive older woman took him to a movie theater for the first time; movies, like TV, are taboo to the Haredi. They saw Roman Polanski's 'The Pianist,' about a Jewish musician who hides in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and, toward the end, plays Chopin on a piano in the ruins, while the rest of his family is slaughtered in the Holocaust. For Indursky, whose maternal grandparents survived Nazi concentration camps and many of whose relatives were murdered, the portrait of 'our most broken days,' rendered in this powerful medium, was overwhelming.
Soon, in Jerusalem cinemas, he saw high-art films that taught him something he couldn't yet articulate for himself: film's ability to conjure the spiritual from the earthly. 'If you ask Haredi people,' he said, 'film is the most unreligious medium. But I got that you can try to find the holiness in life through the camera.' He was transfixed by 'the spirituality inside the frames,' inside not only stories but individual images.
Then, with just a set of still photographs and an outsize determination, he applied and was accepted to Israel's leading film school. When he graduated, his final short movie, an enigmatic narrative about a pair of Haredi men, won the school's best film award and was shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Already he had begun envisioning the ultra-Orthodox family that would populate 'Shtisel.'
The series, which Indursky wrote with Ori Elon, is set in Geula, another ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood, where Akiva, a painter, shows talent but shrinks with uncertainty. He lives with his recently widowed father, Shulem, who is at once tender and terribly oppressive — and who views Akiva's artistic yearning as worse than folly.
Akiva gains the attention of a gallery owner who gives him a show and plans to feature a portrait of an ultra-Orthodox woman with a baby in her arms. The painting is as much universal as Haredi; it is about the primal longing for maternal love. But in Shulem's mind, the woman is his deceased wife, and he reacts with rage, partly because a bit of hair can be seen outside her tichel, her mandatory head covering. To make matters more egregious, Akiva does a television interview to promote the upcoming show — and word gets out. 'All of Geula is talking about my son, who paints his mother like a whore in the market,' Shulem rebukes Akiva. Before the show's opening, Shulem buys the painting. He takes it home, and after moments of painful hesitation that resonate with feeling for his son and agony over the loss of his wife, he destroys it.
Indursky explained that much of the repression Akiva confronts — and internalizes — from his father and community stems from a general ultra-Orthodox fear of artistic thrall, because it is seen as a betrayal of faith. 'If you serve the god of art,' he said about his character's predicament, 'you betray the God of your parents.'
Fearful boundaries define the series. But within those boundaries and the compression, the narrowing they cause, an acute emotional power arises — privately within individual souls or between family members or between Akiva and the potential brides he sets his heart on or within Shulem's vivid dreams of his marriage. The show contains not a kiss, let alone a glimpse of sensual flesh, but when Shulem opens a closet door and, for several seconds, puts his face between his dead wife's dresses, inhaling them, we intuit his erotic connection with her and know the depth of his dependence.
'Shtisel' reverberates with Indursky's attachment to — and love for — the world he grew up in. This comes through not only in the complexity of the characters, in the way Indursky reveals them from ever-shifting angles, but also in the paradoxical allure of the show's unexalted imagery, on the gritty streets and in the close, decidedly unlovely interiors where the characters live their devout, constricted lives. 'Shtisel' holds what Indursky long sought: 'spirituality inside the frames.'
Indursky and I visited his parents one afternoon in their apartment, on a steep Givat Shaul street a few blocks from where he grew up. His mother, with soft eyes and a quick smile below her maroon tichel, served us a snack of fruit cocktail and kugel. 'I prayed and prayed and prayed,' she said, about all the years when Indursky — the youngest of her five children, the rest of them rigorously religious — strayed from faith. She prayed that one day 'he would marry a good religious woman and build a home with religious children — that he would be as us.' She visited the graves of venerated rabbis and spoke her prayers there. To give her prayers greater strength, she fasted once a week.
His father, wiry and vibrant, with a long silvery beard, brought me a photograph of Indursky around the time of his bar mitzvah. During the period when all went awry, he said, he spoke to the picture with love, imploring his son to come back to belief. Sitting beside him, I thought about a story Indursky told me. Before his retirement, his father was not only a copy editor but also a cantor who sang prayers in a range of synagogues and a talented scribe who was paid to make copies of sacred texts in his graceful hand. 'He has the soul of an artist,' Indursky had said. 'I think if he was not born a Haredi person, he would have been a musician or maybe a painter.' As a child, though, Indursky started to sense his father's tortured relationship with art when someone lent him a recording of the opera legends Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras and Plácido Domingo. His father copied it onto a cassette and treasured the music, listening on his headphones. At one point, Indursky asked if he could hear the cassette that had kept his father mesmerized. But his father told him that he had erased it, that he had to. The echo of those beautiful voices in his head was corrupting his prayers. It was 'getting in the way of his serving God,' Indursky said.
Here was the conflict that threatened Akiva's art — and that unconsciously may have preyed upon Indursky in the wake of the success of 'Shtisel.' When the show came out and took off, Indursky was photographed for Israeli papers and interviewed on Israeli TV. He toured Jewish community centers and synagogues in the United States. He got himself an apartment in a bohemian neighborhood of Tel Aviv, drank in music clubs and bars and dated women he met on Tinder. And gradually, his writing ran aground. He conceived and sold an idea for an obliquely autobiographical series about a philosophy professor who writes a surprise best seller on Baruch Spinoza and the subject of happiness but is secretly miserable. Yet he couldn't produce a coherent script even for the first episode. As all inspiration and ability seemed to drain away, he contracted Covid. It left him with excruciating pain in his joints. It wouldn't let him sleep. It lasted more than half a year. Doctors failed to help him, and he wondered if the pain was psychosomatic. The self-doubt only worsened the torment.
Inside him, 'something was exploding.' The reception of 'Shtisel,' which had so totally exceeded his fantasies, now left him with 'a powerful empty feeling.' It was as if the writing was 'not connected to me. I was losing my compass.' When he came home after late nights out and stepped into his building's elevator, he stared, bewildered, disoriented, scared, into the mirror on the elevator's back wall. 'I was not even seeing myself.'
This crisis was the beginning of his religious return. Another key moment happened while he was in Manhattan to give a 'Shtisel' lecture in 2021. News came from home, and it was devastating. His mother had received a cancer diagnosis. He promised her that he would go to the tomb of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a towering rabbi of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect and esteemed by most Haredi, to pray for her there. At the tomb, in Queens, he called his mother, then laid his phone near the gravestone, so she could pray to Schneerson directly. She was loud, 'crying, sounding like some animal,' he said, 'begging to God.' It is a tradition to leave letters of supplication, in scraps, at the tomb. He hadn't planned on doing that, but he wrote a letter to the rabbi, saying 'that I'm lost in this world, that I can't live without my mother.' He wept as he recounted this. 'I tore up the letter and put it there' in bits by the grave. 'You trust that even so, the rebbe or God can read it. It was maybe the first time I became again an innocent Jewish boy, believing.'
This wasn't yet a reconversion, only a crucial dalliance. But on Tinder, he met the woman who would become his wife, a French Jew who had recently moved to Israel and wished to become more observant. 'In slow motion,' he said, she helped to lure him toward his past.
Another force, perhaps much more essential than the role played by his mother or his wife, also drew him back. This force was, for him, both difficult to capture in words and inescapably palpable. It was a longing, he said, for 'the shtetl,' the impoverished Eastern European settlements where great numbers of the ultra-Orthodox once dwelled. There, into the first decades of the 20th century, they were segregated and preyed upon in pogroms. Indursky's yearning for a place of such darkness might sound baffling, but during our conversations, he spoke about Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom he considers a literary soul mate. (He doesn't compare their talents, though it wouldn't be far-fetched to call him a Singer for our age.) For Singer, who spent part of his youth in a shtetl and part in a shtetl-like pocket of Warsaw, a persistent theme was the paradoxical flourishing of religious belief precisely where and when God seemed to be scarcely in evidence. For Indursky, the Haredi of today are a reminder of history and of an appealing religious ardor, a counterintuitive and powerful faith in God, amid the cruelties of shtetl existence.
Indursky spoke, too, about something infinitely darker than the shtetl: a longing, which he tried to explain several times during our week together, for Auschwitz.
'I ask myself, how was I not there?' Indursky said about the concentration camp. 'I have something inside me that wants to be there,. I feel I was there, because it was such a huge thing in our history, in my identity, as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors' and as a relative of the dead. 'When I have been to Eastern Europe, I feel them, I hear them, I smell them, I walk with them.'
This was bound up with his re-embrace of faith, he said, because it tugged him to a place and point in history when God was, at once, most absent and most present. He tried to illuminate this idea with an abstruse lecture on the tenets of Hasidism, the branch of Haredi belief he now subscribes to. But he also offered an example, a rare scene. 'On the way to the gas chamber, naked, people were singing' praises to the truth of the Torah. 'They were walking into death with singing, with words of believing. Saying the more God hides himself, the more I can feel him. Saying it is my choice, I bring him to be.'
During one of our trips to Bnei Brak, I accompanied Indursky into a Haredi shul for afternoon prayers. Physically, the sanctuary was bleak, yet the bleakness was all but erased by the passion of the men within. Indursky bowed rhythmically, vigorously as he recited silently: 'The Lord is near to all who call him.' Next to him, another man worshiped while whipping his body from side to side, making the long fringes of his tzitzit fly, and in front of him, another fingered and clutched at the carved wooden wall of the aron kodesh.
God's existence is not, for Indursky, an absolute certainty. God is, instead, an entity repeatedly affirmed by his decisions to pray multiple times each day, to dress in Hasidic garb, to observe the rituals of his religion. 'If,' he said, 'you think now about God, He exists now, for one moment.'
'Kugel,' Indursky's new series, explores this approach to faith in God as an act of will — or, some might argue, of self-deception. A prequel to 'Shtisel,' the show, which Indursky has written alone, is set in the ultra-Orthodox community of Antwerp. It features Shulem's brother, Nuchem, and his 22-year-old daughter, Libbi, shortly before they move to Jerusalem and become part of the narratives in 'Shtisel.' The Haredi of the two cities are so tightly intertwined that, as Nuchem says, 'they eat falafel in Antwerp and burp in Mea Shearim' — Jerusalem's most insular ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. Nuchem is a charming hustler whose self-justifying motto is that 'a good story is never a lie.' This line is more than his sly credo. It is theology, half-concealed by the show's often playful tone. God, for Indursky, is paradoxically a great tale and a great truth.
To boost his income as a gem merchant, Nuchem deceives new widows — or helps them deceive themselves — into believing that their husbands ordered them a pricey piece of jewelry just before their deaths. He arrives at the widows' homes as they sit shiva, shows them the earrings or necklace, speaks of how lovingly their husbands talked about them and says that, alas, their husbands passed on before they could pay him. Readily the widows choose to trust in the story Nuchem is offering. Eagerly they pay for these gifts, these false emblems of their husbands' adoration. He cons them but also lightens their grief and leaves them feeling beloved.
As a 'holy charlatan,' Nuchem brings blessings despite 'working on the periphery of the moral,' Indursky said. Nuchem is a twisted, comic vehicle for Indursky's thinking on religious belief.
Libbi, meanwhile, has inherited her father's gift for fiction. Her short stories are so moving that another character says they make him feel closer to God. She is, like Akiva, impelled by artistic desire, but she is much more prepared than Akiva to give up her art, so that she can be betrothed to the right Haredi man and start to live out her prescribed role, raising Haredi children. Her journey allows Indursky to deal with one of the most damning indictments of ultra-Orthodox society: that it is horribly repressive to women.
One early evening, as we walked the narrow warrens of Mea Shearim, Indursky talked, not for the first time, about the place of women in Haredi life. It was a problem heavily on his mind, especially because he and his wife have a 1-year-old daughter, their first child. She goes to a secular day care center, because they found that their local ultra-Orthodox options lacked light and cheer. Indursky is torn about the future; he wants their daughter to be imbued with the spiritual depths of a Haredi education but not its insistence on a second-class status for girls.
But suddenly, during our walk, his words veered in a hopeful direction. In Hasidic theology, he said emphatically, the entire world, to its benefit, will one day be ruled by women. He led us into an alley and stopped walking so he could make his points with more intensity. 'I will show you the sources,' he promised. Then he turned to freedom and respect for L.G.B.T.Q. people. This, too, he asserted, was promised by the Hasidic sages. Later, he sent me a 20-page document with rabbinic writing on the subject. He seemed a little like the hallowed rabbi he imagined becoming long ago, contributing to millenniums of Talmudic commentary. 'Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Epstein (1751–1823), a Kabbalist and one of the great rebbes of the Hasidic movement, writes in his work 'Ma'or vaShemesh' about ideas that may remind us of Judith Butler's theories — ' Indursky wrote to me, 'envisioning a time when gender distinctions will no longer exist.'
Indursky speaks often of what he calls his 'oxymorons.' These internal conflicts range from his daughter's schooling to the war in Gaza — and they tie into his conception of and relationship with God. About the war, during our conversations, just before the current cease-fire, his outpourings could not capture all his divergent feelings, all the nuances and inversions between agony and resolve. 'In our books,' he said, 'there is an expression, 'mitzvah war'' — war as commandment. 'But there are a lot of things in the Bible that are impossible to stand behind.' Yet while no war is for him a mitzvah, this was a 'no-choice war,' a war compelling pity and warranting guilt but a war that 'reality forced' on Israel. He added, 'When someone comes to you and says, 'Israel does genocide,' or, 'Israel does justice,' God is not there. God is with the contradictions.'
Another of his internal conflicts is about Israel's longtime military exemption for Haredi citizens, who make up around 14 percent of the country's population, a roiling issue that divides the nation. 'I am so ashamed,' he said, about never having served in the Israeli Defense Forces. But despite this regret, he is opposed to mandating military service for the ultra-Orthodox; he would preserve the separation between Israel's military might and its Haredi people. In his mind, the country's martial strength, though necessary to its survival, is a threat to the heart of Judaism. This heart is defined by a familiar history, by century upon century of stateless wandering and a resilience dependent not on earthly power but on devotion to the Book. For much of Israeli society, in his telling, there is ambivalence, at best, about this heart and history. There is a desire to 'delete' the 'diasporic Jew,' a people physically weak and ever-imperiled yet uniquely steeped in religious learning. There is a wish to replace 'the gas chamber Jew with the muscular Jew.' But he went on, 'I prefer to see in the mirror some old diasporic Jew.'
'Maybe I have nothing except this,' Indursky said to me once, speculating about the reasons for his singular artistic focus on ultra-Orthodox life and his own re-embrace of religion. Haredi existence was his only material and only home. But plainly, as I listened, it was more than that. His depiction of today's Haredi people is a resurrection, in a sense, of the 'old diasporic Jew,' and his religious return as well as his writing puts him in touch with the past that some part of him yearns for, a past of extreme vulnerability, a nightmarish past, a past of God's absence and flickering, glowing presence.
Indursky's next series, set to begin filming within the year, will be about the ultra-Orthodox who live in a shtetl in the late 19th century. It will be about a time and place of pogroms. Indursky will be searching for God's presence there. The show will be called — with at least as much longing as irony — 'Lost Paradise.'