'Unorthodox' Remembers Atrocities Of The Past While Stepping Bravely Into The Future

“I have tears in my eyes,” 24-year-old actress Shira Haas says, answering to the shocking results of a 2018 survey by the Claims Conference, a business really interested in preserving the memories of Holocaust victims. The study reports that 41 percent of millennials believe that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the genocide (compared to the 6 million Jewish people who lost their lives, and the roughly 11 million people total who perished), and 66 percent of millennials cannot mention what Auschwitz was. The mere say of the mass murder site, where 40 concentration and extermination camps were operated by Nazi Germany while in World War II, hits close to house for the Israeli actress. Her grandfather is a Auschwitz survivor.


The Holocaust, though not the focal point of the four-part limited series, is woven intricately into Unorthodox, the Netflix drama inspired by Deborah Feldman’s autobiography by the same name, much like it’s woven into the stories of the millions of Jews alive today. Haas plays Esther Shapiro, a Ultra-Orthodox woman from Brooklyn desperate for a new life; one in which she can play the piano, sing, and explore every aspect of her multifaceted personality without limits. Although any time while she fails to find the freedom she craves within Williamsburg’s tight-knit Hasidic community, she flees to Germany. It’s a choice that her loved ones and, at times, Shapiro herself cannot quite understand, made all of the more complex any time once she discovers she’s pregnant.


“We can’t avoid that the story is happening in Berlin,” Haas tells MTV News. Germany’s capital city, right considering that, was residence to the biggest percentage of the country’s Jewish population before the Nazi’s rose to power in 1933. It was also the backdrop of Kristallnacht, a November night in 1938 as soon as most of the city’s synagogues were torched and Jewish homes and corporations were vandalized. With such an extensive history of hate crimes against Jewish people, it can be challenging for viewers to understand why a Hasidic Jew, or a Jewish person of any denomination, might ever return. However through her tumultuous and emotional journey, Esther, who also goes by the performer name Esty, speedily learns that Berlin — and the world behind her religious sect — isn't as dark and dangerous as she was led to believe.


“[Esther] learned a lot of things about the outdoors world; that it’s not that scary,” Haas says. She learned this the way most of us learn anything: by taking small steps. Slowly, she starts swapping out her long skirt for jeans; she tries wearing lipstick and explores Berlin’s nightlife with her new, secular companions. “[Esther] was told that if she ate ham she would vomit or perish, and that other folks are going to hurt her,” Haas adds. “And she understood it’s not like that.” Maybe the most profound symbol of her path forward is once Esty removes her sheitel (a wig worn by wedded conventional Jewish females) and leaves it to drown in Lake Wannsee, located next to the villa where the Nazis convened in 1942 to discuss the Final Solution to the “Jewish Question.” Esty struggles in this moment to relinquish the trappings of her former life although, ultimately, finds liberation in her transformation.


Still, there really are characteristic of contemporary society for which Esty’s sheltered, smartphone-free life in Brooklyn could not have prepared her. She shutters in disbelief once her new companions speak nonchalantly about the Holocaust and pass jokes about Hitler’s bunker. Meanwhile, she grapples with her rigid faith whenever she sees queer couples openly kissing in clubs and on streetcorners; her mother, who left Williamsburg’s Hasidic community and moved to Berlin before Esty, is in a relationship with another woman herself. “You can’t remove, so rapidly, everything you’ve been taught,” Haas says of Esty’s culture shock upon arrival to Berlin. “She might’ve left, nevertheless this was her house, her family member, the people she loved, her teachers, the only thing she knew.” Rapidly, she learns that fleeing a ultra-Orthodox neighborhood for a progressive city requires a challenge to her entire core belief system.


“She comes from a place where the past is the present,” Haas explains, alluding to the community’s commitment to rebuilding the population soon following the Holocaust. “And suddenly she has a conflict between the past and her community, and the present and moving on.” The actress compares the experience to a choose-your-own-adventure game, with Esty having to determine between staying in Berlin, auditioning for the Chalhulm Conservatory of Music, and beginning a new life, or going back to the only one she’s ever known. The decision is a hard one, although her most tough choice was leaving Williamsburg in the initial place.


“I spoke to an ex-Hasidic woman before the show, and I remember asking her, ‘Why did you aspire to leave?’” Haas recalls. “She just looked at me and mentioned, ‘Shira, no one wants to leave.’” Yet Esty has no choice. She follows every rule in hopes of feeling accepted by her community and still comes up short. Her wedding to a boy named Yanky, whom she had met through a matchmaker and wedded upon approval from his mother, was something she imagined a ticket to a new life. That is, up until the struggle to conceive made her feel more like an outsider than ever before.


To perceive this intense feeling of isolation means probing deeper into the significance of procreation to Hasidic communities and understanding that it’s directly correlated to a centuries-long history of the persecution of Jews. “The Hasidic community was built from loss,” Haas says. “It was built as a close community to continue what people have attempted to destroy. We’re living the present to honor the dead.” Esty confirms this herself any time as soon as she goes in for a ultrasound and the doctor suggests discussing her options. “Where I come from, children are the most crucial thing,” Esty says, shutting down alternatives like abortion and adoption entirely. “We’re rebuilding the 6 million lost.”


The series doesn’t hold back once showing the physical pain and emotional distress Esty endures to get pregnant. In one scene, she’s even given a dilator kit to help make the full experience far less painful. “They hurt,” she tells Yanky, to which he responds, “We have to prepare a family member whether it appeals to you or not.” And while the expectation to procreate and the measures taken to construct a family member may seem extreme to the secular viewers, it’s not unique to conventional doctrines. The initial mitzvah, or “good deed,” in the central text of Judaism, the Torah, is to “be fruitful and multiply,” which can be interpreted differently depending on religious denomination. “Being religious or conventional doesn’t necessarily mean one thing,” Haas explains. “There are so several different approaches to it and family member dynamics.”


Identically, Haas says that her grandparents, though not conventional themselves, felt a renewed sense of responsibility to help rebuild the Jewish population immediately following the Holocaust. So did several other Jews, without consideration of how religious they were. “I come from a secular family member, although my grandfather is a Auschwitz survivor. My grandmother is also a survivor from Hungary,” Haas reveals. “They met in Israel. As soon as they met, it wasn’t even about love almost. It was just about, ‘Let’s make a family member. Right now. They’re attempting to kill us. Let’s rebuild what they’re attempting to destroy.’ And in the event you look at it like that, then it’s not revenge. Response The reply is love, actually. It’s family.”


It’s for this reason that the actress encourages viewers to be open-minded while watching the series and not to look at the Hasidic community in black and white. “If someone sees the show, and sees these people that they don’t know, [and] sees that they are humans, they are people, they have desires, they have love, they have disappointments, and they’re detailed characters, then we did it all,” she says. And though Esty feels inclined to explore what else is out there, she never forgets where she comes from. In one particularly desperate moment, she calls her grandmother in Brooklyn; the call is refused. “That was the scene that killed me,” Haas mentioned. “This is really the moment that she’s fully alone.”


“Moving forward doesn’t mean removing your roots, and I think that’s segment of Esty’s journey,” Haas says. “For her, it’s about going to the future. It doesn’t mean to forget about your past.” It’s a signal for young people today to remember the Holocaust, to keep close to your heart the memory of these we’ve lost and also because the sheer power of human resilience. “It’s something that is segment of my roots,” Haas says. “We need to remember routinely, yet we need to keep on going.” And with the Anti-Defamation League’s announced 150 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents from 2013 to 2018 In the
U.S., Remembering Jewish history, in particular, this message is perhaps more key right now than ever before.


“Nowadays, with all the anti-Semitism, it’s even more crucial to tell these stories,” Haas says. “We won’t have survivors forever. This is the last generation, so we have a key role in that.” Unorthodox is Haas’s way of fulfilling that duty, reminding us all that we need to pay homage to our roots — no matter how painful the memories, and keep going. Esty’s moment of power arrives throughout an audition that secures her future at the Chalhulm Conservatory. In a last minute switch, she decides to forgo the piano and sing a song from her past: “An Perish Musik” by Franz Schubert, a preference of her grandmother’s. And thus, “she’s not avoiding her past completely,” Haas says. “[She’s] understanding that it’s segment of her, although nothing that’s going to stop her.”