‘Rebbe Nachman’ Tales to Hit the Big Screen

13 Oct
2014

Novelist’s journey back to his Jewish heritage inspires movie based on hassidic legend’s teachings, featuring Israeli star Yehuda Barkan.

This article originally appeared in Arutz Sheva.

Photo by Tzvi Fishman

Photo by Tzvi Fishman

Novelist Tzvi Fishman has discovered a new way of doing t’shuva (repentance) during this High Holiday season. He’s making a movie.

The Rambam (Maimonides) writes that to do complete repentance, a person has to go back to the place where he sinned and refrain from doing the same misdeeds which he did in the past. Fishman hasn’t gone back to Hollywood, but he has gone back to his old profession of making movies.

After a thirty year hiatus, he’s directing and producing a feature film starring Yehuda Barkan, Israel’s all-time box-office champ, and winner of this year’s prestigious Ofir Award for lifetime achievement in the Arts. The movie is based on four stories of the Hassidic Master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, and it also stars Fishman’s old friend from Hollywood, Daniel Dayan, the fellow who got Tzvi interested in Torah way back then in Tinsel Town.

Fishman recalls: “Daniel was trying to be an actor back then. One day on the beach, he asked me why I didn’t know anything about Judaism. The question hit me on the head like a thunderbolt from out of the sky. I had learned about philosophy, world history, science, sociology, psychology, and art, but I never learned anything about the very thing that was closest to me. It was his question that got me started on a magical-mystery-tour voyage back to Torah and the Land of Israel.”

Today, Rabbi Daniel Dayan studies Torah all night in the kollel of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai in Meron, northern Israel, and teaches during the day. When Fishman felt the bug to return to filmmaking, he called his old friend, Daniel, and suggested they make a feature film out of the fairytale-like stories of Rebbe Nachman.

Read the rest of the article at Arutz Sheva here.

Find out more about the project and how to support it at this link.

Comment Form

top