Torn

About The Film

Can a person be a practicing Jew and a Catholic priest at the same time? Raised by a gentile family and ordained as a Polish Catholic priest, Father Romuald Waszkinel discovers years later that he was born Jacob Weksler to Jewish biological parents who were murdered in the Holocaust. TORN follows his extraordinary transformation from conducting mass in Poland to life as an observant Jew on an Israeli kibbutz. The deeply spiritual Waszkinel is torn between conflicting identities, unable to renounce Catholicism or his newfound Judaism, and therefore rejected by both. In the meantime, his request to be granted Israeli citizenship is mired in a bureaucratic labyrinth of immigration law. Filmmaker Ronit Kertsner raises profound questions about what it means to be Jewish in this soul-searching, cruelly ironic documentary about identity.