As shoppers mill about the cobble-stoned street of Jerusalem’s Mamilla Mall, below ground – on the basement floor of the popular arcade – some 20 Haredi women teachers are noisily taking up their seats to watch a film that will expose them to the horrors of Oct. 7, the grim details of which have not fully reached Israel’s Haredi community.

Seated individually and kitted out with a pair of slick virtual reality (VR) goggles, each woman is set to watch a 45-minute, 360-degree film that will give them a close-up look at some of the events that took place on Oct. 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists from the Gaza Strip invaded southern Israel, murdering, maiming and raping some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping some 250 more. Generally eschewing the internet and mainstream media, many Haredi Israelis have not learned about the full extent of the massacres, the repercussions of which continue to shape Israeli society and discourse more than 10 months later.

The film’s visuals are striking. From the sky, drone footage captures the overwhelming size and scope of the devastation wreaked by the terrorists on what’s become known as the “Black Shabbat,” while on-ground camerawork takes the viewer on a personal journey deep inside some of the worst-hit communities: Kibbutz Be’eri, Kibbutz Nir Oz and Kibbutz Kfar Aza, as well as the site of the Nova Music Festival in Re’im.

And while the film, shot by production company Triumph of the Spirit, has already been seen by thousands of people in Israel and around the world, its main audience now, according to the film’s director, Miriam Cohen, is the Haredi community.

“In the beginning, we shot some short films in English with the goal of reaching audiences outside of Israel; we wanted to scream the story to the world of what happened to us,” Cohen, whose company mainly relies on personal loans and ticket sales to fund its filmmaking, told eJewishPhilanthropy in a recent interview.

Using the VR format, which offers viewers an immersive, panoramic perspective, the first batch of three-to five-minute films, including some terrifying raw footage from Hamas terrorists’ bodycams, was screened all over the world, often in the presence of the families of the hostages as they appealed for international support to get their loved ones released.

Later, Cohen and her partners – producers Chani Kopilowitz and Avi Halfon – joined forces with the Israel Defense Forces to create a longer version for soldiers heading into or out of Gaza. This version of the film is still being shown regularly at a site along the border of the Palestinian enclave even as the 10-month-old war continues to rage.

But then, Cohen, who grew up in the Haredi community in the Hashmona’im settlement between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, began to take note of voices within her own community and realized she had a duty to show the film to Haredi audiences too.

“I remember hearing comments that showed me how very disconnected they were from this story,” Cohen recalled to eJP. “They were out of the story completely, they just didn’t know anything about what had happened – and not because they don’t want to know what happened but because they don’t have internet, they don’t hear the radio and they don’t have access to the news.”

“I understood how disconnected they were,” she continued. “And I realized we had a huge duty to do something about it in our own community.”

While the religious-secular debate over mandatory military service has been raging in Israel for decades, the issue has come into sharper focus over the past 10 months as hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been called up for reserve duty to fight in Gaza or on the northern border.

With reports that the army could be facing a manpower shortage as the war drags on, many Israelis increasingly struggle to understand why some Haredi sects remain fiercely opposed to having their young men join the army or take up some type of national service.

“This issue is not something we can ignore,” said Cohen. “This conflict is very big and very complex, and if you ask me if I think my film can make a difference, then I would definitely say, yes.”

She added: “How big that change will be, I don’t know – but I do know that it does make some kind of an impact.”

Cohen and Kopilowitz are no strangers to making highly emotive films with high impact value. Four years ago, not long after getting into the business of virtual reality films, the two specially trained filmmakers traveled to Poland — during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — to capture in 360 degrees the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The goal of that film, which shares the same name as their production company, was to give Haredi audiences the chance to visit Holocaust sites and understand the painful history in a similar way to secular Israelis, who often have the chance to visit Poland in high school.

More than 200,000 people — “Jews in general and ‘believing Jews’ specifically,” as Cohen phrased it to eJP last year — have seen that film (also in the basement of the Mamilla Mall and at other private screenings).

It was the response to that film that spurred them to capture the events of Oct. 7 in a similar way, Cohen said.

“Immediately on Oct. 7, we understood that we have an amazing tool, and if we don’t do something with it, then it would be bad,” she said. “I remember Chani calling me even before we knew what was going on, she said to me, ‘Listen, we have this amazing tool, and we have to do something with it.’”

But, Cohen, like many Israelis, was in shock and all she wanted to do was “stay in my bed and cry.”

“I told her, ‘I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t want to talk to anyone,’” the director recalled of that fraught conversation. But her filmmaking partner was persistent: “She said to me: ‘You’re going to take all these emotional feelings that you have, and you’re coming with me to film this because you owe it to your people.’”

At first the team struggled to get permission to enter the devastated sites, but with the help of Halfon, a former producer for the BBC, the team managed to join a media tour to Kibbutz Be’eri.

“We had to pretend that we were from press because that was the only way we could enter,” Cohen said, recounting how after witnessing the destroyed homes and smelling the remains of burnt flesh, she told her partner: “I feel like we just visited Auschwitz the day after its liberation.”

It was a few months later – after returning to the massacre sites multiple times, including with survivors and relatives of those taken hostage or murdered – that Cohen had to convince Kopilowitz to make an alternative version of the film for their own community.

“I told Chani, ‘Remember what you told me on Oct. 8? Now we have to do something for our community,’” she said, describing how in the Haredi-friendly version Rabbi Yisrael Goldwasser, a member of the Ger Hasidic community, guides viewers through the destruction, describing what happened with references that speak to a more observant crowd and with less graphic images. 

“The rabbi talks in a language they are used to, with religious and historical references to help them better understand what happened that day,” Cohen explained, adding, “People can’t stop crying after they see it — it is the first time they really understand how big this thing was.”