We mourn the loss of the American documentary filmmaker Menachem Daum, much of whose work touched on Jewish history and heritage in Poland and often challenged preconceived notions and stereotypes. Daum passed away over the weekend, aged 77. May his soul be bound up in the bond of life!
Among Daum’s films are A Life Apart (1997), narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker and Leonard Nimoy, which focused on Hasidic life in New York, and Hiding and Seeking (2004), in which he returned to Poland with his two sons, to seek information about the Christian farming family who saved the life of family members during the Shoah by hiding then for 28 months. In a 2016 film, The Ruins of Lifta: Where the Holocaust and Nakba Meet, he explored, with a Palestinian expelled from the village and a Holocaust survivor, the fate and potential future of the only Arab village abandoned after the 1948 war that was not totally destroyed or repopulated by Jews.
His current film project was the documentary Gone But Not Forgotten: Memory Keepers of Poland’s Jewish Past, about the many non-Jewish Poles who have taken it upon themselves to clean, rescue, restore, and maintain Jewish cemeteries and other Jewish heritage in Poland.
“I am the son of Holocaust survivors from Poland and for most of my life accepted my parents’ view that all Poles were incorrigible anti-Semites,” Daum states on the web site for Gone But Not Forgotten.
But my frequent travels to Poland over the past 30 years challenged this stereotype and made me realize that Poles, like all human beings, represent a complex combination of light and darkness. This is what motivated me to make my […] film Hiding and Seeking in which I tell the story of Poles who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. In the present film I will tell the story of Poles who save Jewish memory from cultural annihilation. My goal in making both of these films is to challenge the simplistic prejudices Poles and Jews often have of each other. I hope this film, like the work of the Memory Keepers themselves, contributes to halting the inter-generational transmission of hatred or prejudice.
Like many Americans I am deeply troubled by the drift towards ethno-nationalism we see not only in Europe or South America but also in our own country. I feel this film’s story of Poles who are resisting this trend and struggling for a democratic, tolerant and self-critical Poland provides an example that many Americans can relate to and be inspired by.
An orthodox Jew, Daum was born in 1946 in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. His parents were both Holocaust survivors whose spouses and children had been murdered in the Shoah. The family was able to immigrate to the U.S. when Daum was five, and he grew up mainly in Brooklyn, where he lived until his death.
By profession a gerontologist before turning to filmmaking, Daum began traveling to Poland in 1988, when he accompanied the Hasidic singer Shlomo Carlebach on a concert tour. He was taken aback by the number of Christian Poles who flocked to the concerts. He also visited his father’s home town, Zduńska Wola, where he found the Jewish cemetery devastated.
“In the years that followed I made many trips to Poland where I continued to encounter Christian Poles who were interested in things Jewish,” he wrote in an essay in The Forward in 2022.
On every visit, I made a stop in Zduńska Wola and noticed the Jewish cemetery looked a little cleaner and better maintained. Clearly there were local people taking care of it. The first of these I met was Elżbieta Bartsch, the director of a school in Zduńska Wola. Later I met Kamila Klauzinska, a graduate student at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University. Kamila went on to write her M.A. thesis about the Zduńska Wola Jewish cemetery and her PhD dissertation on Jewish genealogy.
In 2007 Klauzinska invited him to the rededication ceremony for the restored Zduńska Wola cemetery. In 2008, she invited him back for a gathering she had organized called the First National Conference of Poles who Preserve Jewish Memory. Daum filmed the conference and met with the participants.
“I was moved by the dozens of Memory Keepers who came from all across Poland to attend the event,” he wrote.
“His surviving brother made available to me years of his home movies, videos and photos in which we see Ireneusz toiling to repair broken tombstones and literally sweating to return them to their original locations,” Daum told JHE’s Ruth Ellen Gruber in 2008.
Watch a video shot by Daum after a second conference of Poles who preserve Jewish memory, held in the town of Szczekociny in 2010:
Click here for the Gond But Not Forgotten web site
Clikc here for trailers for the Gone But Not Forgotten documentary
Click here to watch Daum’s 2004 film Hiding and Seeking on vimeo (use password Menachem)
5 comments on “Filmmaker Menachem Daum z”l 1946-2024”
I met him first in the planning for A Life Apart. We shared similar backgrounds and age. He was a gentle soul and I shall miss him
What a wonderful dedicated human being. He will be so missed. His good work will live far into the future.
I worked with Menachem. What a wonderful dedicated human being. He will be so missed.
What a great loss for Polish-Jewish relations, and what a great shock that Menachem passed away so young. The clips of his films, and also of his writing, that you have posted here demonstrate his remarkable wisdom and that he accomplished a very great deal, even if — at times — as a lone voice. Congratulations on putting together this powerful memorial tribute so very fast after his passing.
❤️