Private Project

Dedication

“Dedication” follows Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld as he embarks on the self-imposed mission to hand-write a Torah scroll, despite not being a trained scribe or very artistically inclined.

  • Saul Sudin
    Director
  • Saul Sudin
    Writer
  • Saul Sudin
    Producer
    Punk Jews
  • Jorian Polis Schutz
    Producer
  • Shmuel Herzfeld
    Key Cast
  • Ruth Friedman
    Key Cast
  • Eliezer Adam
    Key Cast
  • Benjamin Abrams
    Editor
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Runtime:
    23 minutes
  • Production Budget:
    15,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Saul Sudin

Saul Sudin is a filmmaker and writer. His documentary production "Punk Jews" was released to acclaim by The New Yorker, Haaretz, and The New York Times and was distributed through the National Center for Jewish Film. In 2013 the viral video “Sleeping on Strangers on the Subway” which he directed received over 500,000 views in its first two days and was featured on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, The Daily Mail, and The Huffington Post, among others. His greatest achievement however, was winning runner up in Popcorn, Indiana’s “Munch Better” commercial contest which won him a year’s worth of free popcorn.

Saul was a founding writer for Hevria.com, one of the most popular Jewish sites of the last decade. From 2014 to 2018, he regularly published essays, short stories, poetry and reviews. He also created their Hevria Sessions music video series, highlighting up and coming Jewish musicians. Throughout his career, he has also contributed to outlets such as The Algemeiner, The Huffington Post, and eJewishPhilanthropy.

Saul holds degrees in Film and Art History from Pratt Institute and was the recipient of the 2006 Outstanding Merit Award in Media Arts & Film. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Saul currently resides in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Elke, with whom he founded Jewish Art Now, a global resource for contemporary Jewish visual art and design that ran from 2011 – 2016.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Over my career, I have developed somewhat of a reputation for honing in on the stories of underrepresented and oddball Jews. People approach me all the time about ideas they have for movies but to find a good subject for a documentary is a nebulous thing. They need to be doing something compelling enough that an audience gets a peek into a world they haven’t seen before, and hopefully the person at the heart of it is just as magnetic, if not more so.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld felt that way to me from the moment I met him. In 2019, my friend and collaborator Jorian Polis Schutz asked me to film his cousin Shmuel who was writing a Torah even though he wasn’t a trained ritual scribe nor had any calligraphic skill. “That’s impossible”, I said to myself.

I was introduced to Rabbi Herzfeld on the streets of Brooklyn, as he excitedly shouted “We’re here to get the Torah!” Then we proceeded upstairs into a building where he was having his Torah corrected of any and all mistakes. There were plenty. “The next one will be better!” he exclaimed.

I know a thing or two about Judaism, but it was hard to pin Rabbi Herzfeld down, exactly. He dresses like a Hasidic man of no particular origin, talks very traditionally and passionately about the Torah and doing Mitzvahs, but acts quite progressively in his day to day. He thinks outside the box and accomplishes his goals by any means necessary. That’s how he ended up writing a Torah as a layman, a massive undertaking even for an expert in the fields of ritual knowledge and calligraphy.

He did it in less than a year, presenting it to Washington D.C. as the first Torah written in our nation’s capital. All with the pomp and circumstance of a Mardi Gras-style parade, featuring an LGBTQ marching band, classic cars, a biker gang, the mayor of DC, and a Torah-themed float from Monsey, NY. I contributed my little strangeness by strapping a GoPro camera to the Torah itself as it was marched up 16th Street, a main avenue that heads north directly from The White House.

I couldn’t have conceived then that I would spend the next few years in the solitude of a global pandemic, working with the footage of that parade like it was some alien artifact of a lost world. The post-production of this film stretched longer than anticipated as everyone worked remotely to collaborate, and waited patiently to be able to film any additional material necessary. It has been a long road to be able to present this film, which I am so proud of.

Early in the film, Rabbi Herzfeld remarks that one of his motivations for undertaking this project was to understand “What does it mean to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai?” And in 2023 we covertly traveled to Saudi Arabia to the supposed archaeological sites of Mt. Sinai to find out (but that’s for another film). My association with Rabbi Herzfeld continues, as he conceives of bigger and stranger goals he can accomplish to engage with Judaism like no other.