NEITHER DAY NOR NIGHT

Israel, 2023, 90 minutes, Colour.

Eli Manashe.

Directed by Phinehas Veuillet

For Israeli and Jewish audiences, there will be great interest in this portrait of Sephardic Jews living in an Ashkenazi community, difficulties, adapting, challenges, crises. The audiences will be familiar with the traditions, the different cultural backgrounds, clashes and compromises.

However, for non-Jewish audiences, some homework is required, the nature of the Ashkenazi traditions, the prevalence of Ashkenazi Jews, the background of the Sephardic Jews, long history, both groups coming to Israel, settling, majority and minority, cultural and religious differences, clashes.

This film focuses on a Sephardic community amongst the Ashkenazi. The father, devout, is a labourer, married with three children, the oldest studying Yeshiva and preparing for his Bar Mitzvah. Is a keen and student, bespectacled, articulate, of his class, expecting to go to the issue of his choice. However, he discovers that only one Sephardic student is acceptable to the Ashkenazi issues and a boy has been chosen because of his wealthy family.

While there is a long sequence of the studies and the young boys at their desks, studying Talmud, the interpretations, there is also the sequence of the Bar Mitzvah, the separation of the men and women, the men in black and traditional garb, the young boys sitting at the table, the central boy giving a long sermon about Wes becoming adults at this time (with reference to pubic hair which shocks his father). The women are separated, the mother having to observe the ceremony through a hole in the wall, a relative coming less modestly dressed causing some kind of panic.

At home, the father is tentative at times with his wife, she very demanding at home, ordering the children and their sometimes refusing to obey her. And there is the upset at the boy not being accepted, the meeting with the head of the school, generally a sympathetic character encouraging of this central boy, but bowing to the acceptance of the rich boy. Violent moments, and finally a confrontation when the father pushes the head of the school who falls down the steps, is injured, and later dies.

This raises moral dilemmas for the father, sitting in his car, pondering, picking up a student and asking his advice, outlining the situation and the student offering a solution from Moses Maimonedes, enabling the person who pushed the other to continue freely because undetected. However, the husband tells his wife. The relatives of the dead school principal come to ask forgiveness of the couple and the young boy is accepted into the college.

But, the audience is left with the moral dilemma and its effect on the father and his sense of responsibility and guilt.