“I thought I was the only Jew who had ever experienced this,” said Avi Tfilinski, who co-created the fascinating new drama series, Ambiguity, with Yossi Madmoni.
The series, which just premiered on KAN 11 (and is also available on kan.org.il), is about a secret society of haredim (ultra-Orthodox) who have stopped believing and meet clandestinely with others who feel as they do, while pretending to their families and communities that they are still observant.
Both creators are from observant backgrounds, but the series was inspired by Tfilinski’s decade-plus experience of life in this hidden community.
He gave a remarkably candid interview about the personal turmoil that led him to become a part of this secret community of non-believers for 12 years.
The Jerusalem Post asked Tfilinski how many people he estimated were part of this secret group, which in Hebrew is referred to as anoosim – forced haredim.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” he said. “My estimate is 30,000 people – roughly half women and half men. What I can say is that only around 10% are what used to be called Sephardi; 90% are Ashkenazi. I don’t know how many are Hassidic and how many are Lithuanian.”
Tfilinski added that any number for this community would be an estimate, as it was difficult to define.
Some are in it only briefly, he said, while some go back and forth in terms of their beliefs and observance their whole lives.
But no matter the exact number of such people, Ambiguity will generate controversy, at least in the haredi community, and Tfilinski and Madmoni welcome the engagement and reaction.
Madmoni is an acclaimed filmmaker and television creator. He has made such films as Restoration, The Barbecue People, and Redemption, as well as a recent series about abandoned religious wives, Matir Agunot.
He was born into a religious Jerusalem family and had a grandfather who was the leader of an ultra-Orthodox community, but Madmoni’s upbringing was far less insular than Tfilinski’s.
“There wasn’t this kind of haredi consciousness of today, where they put up walls between them and the secular world,” he said.
Madmoni was drawn early into a more secular life, serving in the IDF and studying at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School.
The two met when Tfilinski joined a writing workshop that Madmoni was teaching, run by Mifal Hapayis for people who had left the ultra-Orthodox world.
When Madmoni heard Tfilinski’s idea to stage a drama in this secret community, he knew his student had an incredible story to tell and set out to help him. The two began collaborating on Ambiguity, a process that lasted several years. United King Films and Herzliya Studios joined KAN in producing the series.
Top talent flocks to join cast
Ambiguity attracted a cast of many of Israel’s top actors, including Naomi Levov (On the Spectrum), David Volach (a director who grew up haredi and made the films My Father My Lord and Daniel Auerbach), and Noa Koler (Checkout and The Wedding Plan).
Other noteworthy mentions include Hani Furstenberg (Campfire and The Loneliest Planet), Moris Cohen (Our Father), and Gal Toren (The Chef and Losing Alice), along with newcomers such as Yotam Rabinu, Ori Comay, and Neomi Harari.
Tfilinski himself also plays a role in the series.
It is set in and around a Jerusalem apartment during the COVID pandemic, a life-changing time for those who had begun to question their religious beliefs, because, according to Tfilinski, they could hide in plain sight.
They did so, he added, by getting fake diagnoses of COVID and spending two weeks away from their daily life and family in an apartment with other like-minded people.
The first episode focuses on 19-year-old Ruchele (Harari), an employee at a hi-tech company who has just been promoted.
She has deliberately exposed herself to COVID, and comes to the apartment with her mother, who has no idea what is going on with her daughter and wants to make sure it is a respectable place with only Ashkenazi haredi women.
When she drops her daughter off, everything seems fine to her. But as soon as she leaves, the women take off their head coverings, and the men, who are also staying in the apartment, come out.
Life there is an emotional and freeing but often frightening experience for everyone, and at the core of their fear is anxiety that their secret will become known in their community.
Because of this, the characters call each other by pseudonyms. Ruchele goes by the name Shira Haas – the actress who appeared as an ultra-Orthodox girl in Shtisel and as a young woman leaving the haredi world in Unorthodox.
Ruchele quickly finds herself attracted to a young man staying there who calls himself Donald Trump (Comay). While the first episode is mainly about Ruchele, other episodes focus on different characters, including some who are secretly part of the LGBTQ+ community and others who were sexually abused as children by religious authority figures.
Lived experiences inform the plot
Tfilinski counts himself among this latter group. Matter-of-factly, he described how he was sexually abused as a child by men who were respected in his Jerusalem community, including by a rabbi who was a friend of his father.
“This was a very extreme, anti-Zionist community,” Tfilinski said. “By the age of eight, I had already been marked in the haredi community by my father and by the whole cheder [school] as someone attracted to boys, which was considered the worst possible thing. I went through severe persecution because of it.”
“Until age 15, I had to present myself every Shabbat to someone special who was meant to control those urges,” he said, describing a kind of abusive “treatment” meant to turn him into a heterosexual. At the same time, he was preyed on sexually.
“In the end, I married a woman,” he said, saying that he has six children, is divorced, and identifies as bisexual.
“Today I’m 49, and I can stand up and say this is my story, this is my life, for better or worse,” he said.
“I left the ultra-Orthodox world 13 years ago, at the end of 2013... It happened on my 17th wedding anniversary. My wife and I had six children. We celebrated our anniversary, which fell on Tu Bishvat, and then on Saturday night, I left.”
But it was not easy for him to leave. “For 12 years, from the age of 24, I lived a double life, just like in the series. I’m a curious person, so during those years I moved through many different places and discovered many underground circles.”
“We took all those stories, and Yossi [Madmoni], who is a genius, shaped them into a wild, highly charged dramatic story.”
Life under the radar
The members of this secret community of non-believers are initially screened by their willingness to text on Shabbat and then are given the location of a kind of safe house, such as the apartment shown in the show, Tfilinski said.
One interesting aspect is the series showing how strained the characters are, and how simply breaking religious taboos is not enough to lift their sense of burden.
“Only after I left religion did I start to understand what had happened to me. And of course, a month after I left, I was hospitalized,” Tfilinski recalled.
Not surprisingly, he required psychiatric treatment.
The main reason that Tfilinski held back from leaving the community outright when he was in his 20s was his fear of becoming estranged from his children. He has five daughters and one son.
When Tfilinski finally left, he was cut off from them for several years, which he described as extremely painful.
Eventually, one of his daughters decided to contact him when she was 18, and he was able to reach her through a circuitous method that sounds like something out of a spy movie: she called him from a public phone booth.
He said that now he has good relationships with all his children, although he said, “There is still more healing to do.”
He emphasized that he hoped that future generations who question their faith would not have to take the difficult path that he did.
“The phenomenon of anoosim is eventually going to disappear. The whole reason it exists is that haredi society is built in a very old-fashioned, coercive way: people lose resources, lose their children, lose everything if they leave.”
“I hope that ends. Once someone who wants to leave can leave openly, then they won’t be forced into this kind of life.”
On hope and challenges
“Some of the haredi people who think about leaving – part of their fear of the outside world is that it is godless,” Madmoni said.
“It’s important to me to say that this isn’t a series against religion. At the end of the day, it’s a series about people who are searching for God differently.”
Today, Tfilinski is at work on a new project set in the ultra-Orthodox world and often consults on films and television shows set in this sphere.
He supports himself by working at a soup restaurant, and still lives in Nachlaot, the neighborhood where he grew up.
Tfilinski is thrilled that Ambiguity is coming out and is philosophical about everything that has brought him to this place in his life and career.
He likened his years pretending to still be a believer to an actor playing a role, saying that what he experienced was more complex and painful.
“There are people who can go on stage night after night and play one character,” he said.
“But what I’m talking about is different. My story is of someone who has been wounded, someone forced into concealment and denial until he explodes later in life and begins to understand how broken he is.”
“Then, he enters an underground world, where he meets other broken people. And when broken people meet, they build fortresses.”