View all articles by Abigail Klein Leichman
Film records last days of Gush Katif
In two hours, you can see things about last year's pullout from Gaza that could not be written up in a lengthy New York Times analysis.
"Home Game," a powerful 120-minute documentary to be screened Saturday night at Cong. Beth Aaron and Sunday night at Cong. Bnai Yeshurun, both in Teaneck, opens with idyllic scenes of everyday life in a Mediterranean coast town.
"Beach and basketball - that was the talk of the summer," a teen narrates at the beginning of the film.
Beach and basketball - there's nothing political about that. And neither is there anything political about "Home Game." It provides a peek into what should have been a normal July and August for the 410 residents of a sandy, sunshiny agricultural village.
"Home Game" will be in Teaneck at 10 p.m. Sept. 16 at Cong. Beth Aaron, 950 Queen Anne Road ($10 admission, $36 sponsorships); and at 8:15 p.m. Sept. 17 at Cong. Bnai Yeshurun, 641 W. Englewood Ave. ($5 admission). The DVD may be purchased for $36 at the site www.homegamethemovie.com.
But there was nothing normal about last summer in Netzer Hazani, the locale for this mostly amateur-shot film. Its inhabitants were bracing for the arrival of a much-anticipated annual basketball tournament on Aug. 15, and also for the arrival of soldiers with orders to destroy their entire hometown days later.
Would they win in either court?
And in the days leading up to both events, would the youth of the mixed secular-religious community be able to keep their minds on basketball as they and their sister settlements in the Gush Katif bloc of Gaza faced eviction?
These multilayered questions are answered with poignancy in the documentary produced by Avi Abelow, 33, a management consultant who temporarily left his Tel Aviv job and his young family to be with the people of Netzer Hazani during the anguished summer of 2005.
Using amateur footage he shot with a camera smuggled into Gush Katif from friends in his hometown of Efrat, Abelow later put together a four-minute clip to raise funds for the beleaguered families. A friend in the film industry suggested he seek more footage, and he ended up with 80 hours of video from 15 families.
"We realized these were images that every Jew should see in order to understand what happened," said Abelow in a phone interview. To make the production professional enough for international film festivals, the partners edited it down to two carefully crafted hours and interspersed interviews with some of the videographers "to build characters for the audience to connect to," Abelow said.
Filming their final weeks in Netzer Hazani was wrenching, a young woman named Einat relates. Many times, she wants to push her camera's stop button. That she and others resist that impulse is testimony to their determination to document the courage of hundreds of ordinary people forced into an extraordinary historical spotlight.
"Home Game" shows us a village bedecked in orange flags signifying opposition to the Gush Katif expulsion. We see the basketball team members - some wearing kippot, others bareheaded - trying to concentrate on practicing while their elders meet to plan for an uncertain future.
Emotional town meetings are devoted to strategizing: Do we hold out for a miracle? Do we start packing now? Do we await the soldiers separately in our homes or together in the synagogue?
They could cancel the tournament, of course. But they decide that to do so would be to admit defeat on more than one level.
The kids of Netzer Hazani are a tightly knit yet culturally and religiously diverse social group. They laugh as a girl lip-synchs to an audiotape of Ariel Sharon, pledging just a couple of years before that the settlements of Gush Katif would stay. They exchange harsh words as some boys resist showing their resident cards to border police on their way home from a night out. They stay up one night painting every curb, fence, and flagpole orange. "It's therapy," a young man explains.
Even as the cameras record several teens being beaten by border police while peacefully protesting their impending doom, we see their parents turning in weapons to demonstrate that they will not use them against fellow Jews.
When Netzer Hazani's team wins the final playoff game, there is a huge celebration in the streets.
It is to be the last celebration in Netzer Hazani, which in 1977 became the earliest civilian village of Gush Katif. Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had been there to affix its first mezuzah, declaring: "This is a great day for the State of Israel and for Jewish settlement, a day which symbolizes our deep-rooted presence in this area, which has since the Six Day War become an integral part of the State and its security."
We see those mezuzot being kissed and removed from doorposts when the inevitable arrives in the form of flak-jacketed soldiers. We hear silence in answer to tearful pleas from a woman to her female evictor: "Where will my children and I sleep tonight?"
Because the government did not, in fact, have a satisfactory answer to that question, former residents of all the Gush Katif settlements continue to live scattered in temporary and substandard quarters, mostly unemployed and without the compensation money they were promised.
Abelow has pledged that proceeds from worldwide screenings of the film will go to help these refugees.
The producer's father, Peter Abelow, a well-known Israeli tour guide and brother of Beth Aaron congregant Phyllis Zlotnick, will be at the earlier screening to answer questions. The film will precede Beth Aaron's first recital of selichot, the penitential prayers leading to Rosh HaShanah.
"Traditionally, we are taught that repentance is most ideally fulfilled when the individual engaging in repentance is brokenhearted and experiences genuine pain," said the congregation's Rabbi, Larry Rothwachs. "Therefore, identifying with the plight and sharing in the pain of our brothers and sisters is a most appropriate prelude to the teshuva process."
In the end, there were no winners in Netzer Hazani. Not the basketball team - which lost the tense final round of the tournament - nor the residents whose homes, farms, schools, synagogue, and playground were reduced to sand and ash.
Yet even in their defeat, we see the indomitable spirit of a broken people: A member of the losing team, whose family will be led weeping from their home just three days later, starts the crowd singing. Soon, the gym floor is filled with players and spectators, arms linked and voices lifted in songs of togetherness. "Am Yisrael Chai," "The People of Israel Live," they sing lustily, knowing it will be a long time, if ever, before they will again be a community.
|