Mishpacha asked a professional actor to play two roles: that of an insular chareidi in secular Tel Aviv, and a stern policeman in Bnei Brak. What did he discover?

Photos: Menachem Kalish

Part One

Hello. My name is Oded Menaster, and I was a chareidi for a day.

I know the streets of Tel Aviv as well as any secular Israeli. But it was painfully unfamiliar to wander the city’s so-familiar streets in a strange and alien costume. Not the costume of a famous actor or superhero. Not even that of a politician, in honor of election season. I would have done fine with any of those. As a professional stage actor, I’m used to that.

Instead, I wandered the streets of Tel Aviv, the capital of liberal Israel, dressed as a chareidi.

I’m not particularly well-versed in all the nuanced subdivisions of the Orthodox community, but the magazine editor who arranged this charade warned me ahead of time that I was going to become a member of the most extreme sect on the spectrum. Someone my fellow Tel Avivians would associate with rock-throwing and cries of “Shabbes” and “Nazis.”

My clothes came from an authentic Yerushalmi home, and Aryeh, the editor, even showed me the right way to hold a cigarette. It took some practice, but soon I could properly pronounce the name of my adopted chassidus — “Toldoiss Aharen” — so that if I was asked where I was from, the answer would sound authentic.

I doubt many of my colleagues in the acting field would have been willing to undertake this mission. But I believe that awareness is the key to change and that stigmas are there for us to dispel. And I wanted to get a better feel for this very misunderstood, misrepresented sect through natural and spontaneous human contact, not through data on a screen.

It was tough. Very tough. But who said that life is easy? Sometimes you have to expose yourself to the more complicated and painful side of things if you want to help remedy a societal ill.

At least I tried.