The Backstory

The project launched with the film Trembling Before G-d and the 5th Anniversary Celebration of Trembling on the Road.

Trembling Before G-d, seen by 8 million worldwide, is an unprecedented feature documentary directed by Sandi DuBowski that shatters assumptions about faith, sexuality, and religious fundamentalism. Built around intimately-told personal stories of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian, the film portrays a group of people who face a profound dilemma - how to reconcile their passionate love of Judaism and the Divine with the drastic Biblical prohibitions that forbid homosexuality. As the film unfolds, we meet a range of complex individuals - some hidden, some out - from the world's first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to closeted, married Hasidic gays and lesbians to those abandoned by religious families to Orthodox lesbian high-school sweethearts.

Many have been tragically rejected and their pain is raw, yet with irony, humor, and resilience, they love, care, struggle, and debate with a thousand-year old tradition. Ultimately, they are forced to question how they can pursue truth and faith in their lives. Vividly shot with a courageous few over five years in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, London, Miami, and San Francisco, Trembling Before G-d is an international project with global implications that strikes at the meaning of religious identity and tradition in a modern world. For the first time, this issue has become a live, public debate in Orthodox circles, and the film is both witness and catalyst to this historic moment. What emerges is a loving and fearless testament to faith and survival and the universal struggle to belong.

Trembling Before G-d was in theatrical release in the United States, Israel, Canada, Germany, UK, and South Africa. It was launched at New York's Film Forum to incredible audience, critical, and box office response and opened in over 80 U.S. cities. Trembling had a World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and has been the recipient of twelve awards including The Teddy Award for Best Documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, The Mayor's Prize for the Jewish Experience at the Jerusalem Film Festival, The GLAAD Media Award for Best Documentary, The Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at OUTFEST Los Angeles, and The Council on Foundations Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film and Media. The film was nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards for the IFC/Directv Truer Than Fiction Award. The L.A. Weekly named it one of the 10 Best Films of the Year. It was broadcast on BBC, ARTE, Israel's Keshet/Channel Two, The Sundance Channel, HBO Latin America, Australia's ABC, Poland's Canal Plus, Canada's The Documentary Channel, and other TV stations. Feature stories on the project have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Filmmaker Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, The Globe and Mail, CNN, and BBC News among other print and media outlets.

At the World Premiere of Trembling at the Sundance Film Festival, director DuBowski and Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, hosted the first-ever Shabbat at Sundance and with partner Working Films, an unprecedented Mormon-Jewish gay dialogue. Since then, DuBowski has traveled to 100 cities around the world to conduct over 800 dialogues and events with 200,000 individuals across faith, sexuality, age, racial, and Jewish denominational lines. Steven Spielberg's Righteous Persons Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Creative Capital Foundation and other foundations awarded Greenberg and DuBowski seed funding to launch an Orthodox Community Education Project in the U.S., Israel and the U.K. with the film (already eighteen Orthodox synagogues have invited the film to screen). They trained 11 facilitators in Jerusalem who held screenings and led dialogues for 2,000 principals, teachers, school counselors and therapists across the nation, breaking the taboo on discussing the issue of homosexuality in the country's Orthodox (and secular) school systems. And they convened the first Orthodox Mental Health Conference on Homosexuality.

The Trembling Before G-d Outreach Initiative began forging a model of how to creatively and powerfully connect the film with community and social change.

DuBowski created Trembling on the Road, a 40-minute featurette - a dramatic document of dialogues, protests, reactions, and events – by turns poignant, funny, angry, interesting – from the worldwide tour of Trembling Before G-d. Many people who have seen Trembling Before G-d in theaters, festivals or on TV have never seen Trembling on the Road. While for many, Trembling Before G-d was “dare to despair”, Trembling on the Road documents how the film profoundly touched and transformed the lives of individuals, their families, communities, rabbis and teachers. It is incredibly uplifting and says it is possible to make change in the Jewish people.

In 2007, The 5th Anniversary Celebration of Trembling on the Road, the 5th Anniversary Celebration of Trembling on the Road historicized, landmarked, archived, spotlighted and shared how millions of people around the world have been impacted by this work and how Jewish community, identity and leadership have been powerfully changed around core issues of inclusiveness, diversity, compassion, and respect for all - and highlighted where there is still work to be done. The kick-off coincided with the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah (The Jewish New Year - September 12th) and Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement - September 21st), where we launched a creative and innovative international Web 2.0 and face-to-face campaign and organized 85 Trembling on the Road screening and discussion events in 16 countries - in homes, workplaces, and houses of worship. We adapted the distribution and outreach success of models like MoveOn.org and Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, leveraging film/media, blogs, and social networking websites towards communication and action.

The 10 Days are the ideal ritual time for reflection – when we recommit to the freedom to transform ourselves in the world. It is the time to recognize and measure our shortcomings and celebrate the power to make change. On Yom Kippur, no Jew is ever turned away – it is the time of greatest inclusiveness and openness. It is also the painful time during Mincha or the afternoon service that the prohibition against homosexuality in Leviticus is read from the Torah. Our goal was to reach Jews of all denominations, GLBT and straight, during this powerful 10-Day period and beyond. We sought to catalyze people to reflect on the questions: Have you created a more open and welcoming home, synagogue, family, and community? - and to take an action step: Where can you make a transformative change?

Our goal was to leverage the credibility, impact, and legitimacy we carefully built over 15 years and all the relationships and networks we have created worldwide.

Trembling Before G-d has gone way beyond what anyone ever dreamed or imagined and the work with the film to impact social change continues.