These Haredi men chose to have conversion therapy to control their desires. This is how it went

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“I give my kids hugs as much as I can. I’m just so petrified that they’re gonna turn out the way I turned out,” Lev Seltzer, an ultra-Orthodox man, says to his therapist in a heartbreaking moment in a new documentary, “The Therapy.”

In another scene, he attends group therapy. Six men stand in a circle, and each of them declare in turn, “I’m Doron and I’m clear,” I’m Daniel and I’m clear,” “I’m Sam and I’m clear.” When it’s Lev’s turn, he smiles in embarrassment, shifts his feet, looks right and left, looks down, and finally admits, “I am Lev, and I’m not clear.” The therapist asks him if he can say why, and Lev answers in the affirmative. But he can’t manage to get it out. Instead he keeps on shifting in his seat, with an embarrassed smile. He struggles to put his embarrassment into words.

He admits that this is a difficult moment, that he’s afraid that answering the question will put him in a very vulnerable position. Too vulnerable. “There’s not a lot of oxygen here,” he murmurs. In the end, with the encouragement of the therapist, he takes a deep breath, gathers his strength, and succeeds in extracting a few words that make it clear that he is attracted to one of the other men in the circle.

When the therapist asks him to stand in front of the young man and look him in the eye, Seltzer breaks down. He cries, he laughs, he puts his face in his hands and he steps to the side in order to calm down. “I take full responsibility for my thoughts, feelings and needs. They are mine,” he says, after a few long minutes, repeating his therapist’s words after he finally manages to stand in front of the man. The therapist speaks, soothes him and gets Lev to a point where he can say that the attraction he feels has abated.

“The Therapy,” directed by Zvi Landsman, provides a glimpse into what takes place in one of the secret spaces of Haredi society. It exposes the world of so-called conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice which aims to ‘help’ those who experience same-sex attraction ‘control’ it, divert it and live a religious life as they know it.

The film, which was shown this week on Kan public television (and will be made available for viewing on the Kan website and on YouTube), clears the fog that hovers over these treatments, and at times challenges the reflexive opposition that they generate among many outside the Haredi community. There are no electric shocks or brain surgeries, there is no blatant coercion and most of the clients are there because they want to be. They truly want to subdue their homosexuality, and accommodate themselves to the demands and taboos of their society.

The film, which premiered last month at the Docaviv festival and won the judges’ prize, follows two people over two-and-a-half years. Seltzer, 54, is a father of six; he is divorced but wants to remarry (to a woman). In his youth, he experimented with relationships with men, but gave them up when he became a family man. His wife left him when she discovered what kind of things he was viewing online.

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The second figure is Ben Zilberman, a 23-year-old social work student, who as part of his classwork conducted a study of conversion therapies. As a Haredi teenager he fell in love with a classmate in yeshiva, and as a result was sent to conversion therapy. After seven years of treatment, though, he came out of the closet and started to live as an openly gay man, casting doubts on the effectiveness of the treatments.

Ben Zilberman in ‘The Therapy’: Abandoned after coming out
Zvi Landsman, from ‘The Therapy’

For over two years, Landsman quietly followed both men, accompanying them through their processes, and refrained from criticizing the treatments they received. He was respectful of Zilberman’s critical attitude – which intensified with time – toward the therapy he received, but also of Seltzer’s opinion that the treatments were truly helping him become the person he wanted to be.

Throughout his time accompanying the subjects, he chose not to tell them of his own experience with such treatments.

‘It was a sin’

Landsman, 38, grew up in an Orthodox home in Yeruham. He is the son of Leah Shakdiel, a religious feminist activist who was elected to the Yeruham religious council, and following a precedent-setting ruling by the High Court of Justice in 1988, was the first woman in Israel allowed to serve in that position. His father, Moshe Landsman, is a psychologist who set up the first array of psychological services in Arara, Yeruham and the Bedouin areas.

Landsman says he had stopped believing in God in second grade, and in 10th grade he dared to take off his kippa. As a child he understood that he was attracted to men. Even though he grew up in a relatively liberal household, he explains, his environment was not prepared to accept homosexuals: “It was a sin, a deviance, something better not spoken about.”

When he left Yeruham and began his studies at Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, he finally lived his life as he wanted. Over the years, he has run into a few people who have undergone conversion therapy, and his brother even became a therapist who specialized in them. But his move to the capital exposed him to these treatments up close, when he began dating a man who had gone through them.

“I met him at the stage when he was still immersed in the concept of conversion therapy. He believed in it, and didn’t define himself as gay,” says Landsman. “We met for a one-night stand, which from his perspective was just a slip-up. He claimed we were all straight people with psychological problems, but that we could heal, improve and get out of it.”

Zvi Landsman.
Emil Salman

Both of them were 28 years old, and that meeting became a stormy, intense, dramatic and unstable relationship that lasted eight years. They broke up about a year ago, Landsman says, “and it’s still somewhat of an open wound.”

Throughout the relationship, he saw how his partner gradually changed his opinion about conversion therapy. “When we met, he had been in the grasp of conversion therapy for nine years,” he explains. “He hadn’t been in treatment that whole time, but that was his direction. When we met, it was the first time he’d met a gay man who wasn’t problematic and full of complexes. Until then, they had always told him that gays are messed up and sexually promiscuous, can’t commit and aren’t normal. Suddenly, he saw that being gay and being messed up are not the same thing, that there is no causal link between the two. In the religious and traditional world, the majority still believe that it’s a type of illness, or evidence of a developmental or psychological problem.”

His partner gradually distanced himself from religion, slowly detached himself from conversion therapy, started to come to terms with his homosexuality and was no longer determined to fix himself.

Landsman, meanwhile, was a young film school graduate making a living from cinematography – his work includes “The Mute’s House,” which was short—listed for an Oscar. He then got an offer to join a British journalist who had come to Israel to report on conversion therapy in Jerusalem. The journalist had gotten permission to document such treatment, and invited Landsman to film it. For the first time, he was able to see the practice firsthand.

“It was amazing to be there and see everything I heard about from my partner over the years in real time,” says Landsman. “And it was particularly interesting because, after all, I could easily have switched roles with the people there. I could have essentially been there as a patient myself.” It is just a coincidence, he says, that they were educated to follow this path while he found himself somewhere else. “So I found myself observing them while also caring a lot about them.”

At the time, Landsman was working on a documentary that was supposed to be about his relationship with his partner, but when he saw what goes on in conversion therapy, he realized that this was the film he had to make. He was sure there would be interest in the film, but quickly learned that raising the funds for it would be no small task.

A scene from Seltzer’s group therapy, from ‘The Therapy’
Zvi Landsman, from ‘The Therapy’

“To most people, a film like this seemed illegitimate and very dangerous,” he notes. “I applied to all kinds of foundations and broadcasters, and the responses that I got were that it would be shocking to give a platform to a conversion therapist, that I had to be careful and not neutral, because such a topic is dangerous. I, on the other hand, definitely thought it was very important to let the other side speak. If I would have made the film that they expected me to make, one that portrays conversion therapists as monsters, I assume it would have been easier to get funding.”

In the end, Kan 11’s documentary division joined the project, and it is Landsman’s open approach, his nonjudgmental listening to the therapists and patients, that gives the film its power. The reality it portrays is more complex than expected, and it shatters the stereotypes around conversion therapists.

It doesn’t necessarily paint the practice in rosy hues; many of the therapists, it turns out, never studied psychology, but rather took courses within their communities or underwent conversion therapy themselves. But viewers will certainly get new information on what transpires during the treatments, and the diverse people who seek them – information that will require them to rethink their stances.

“These treatments aren’t even called ‘conversion therapy’ – no therapist nowadays will describe himself as a ‘conversion therapist,’ because the title has been tainted,” Landsman says. “They simply call themselves ‘therapists’ who offer treatment. If a patient wants to live a straight life and not a gay one, they offer him all kinds of tools that could work. They claim that ‘conversion therapy’ is violent and illegitimate, and that you cannot tell a person ‘you must change,’ and to achieve that either starve him or give him electric shocks or insult his identity. Their method is to strengthen the patient’s self-confidence, to help him pursue the path that he himself wants to follow.”

But even if this sounds persuasive for a moment, and even if Lev Seltzer promises in the film that the treatment does him good and provides important support, Landsman is careful to clarify that as someone who has watched and heard about conversion therapy for years, the positions of the patients must be examined critically.

“My definition of conversion therapy is different from theirs,” he explains. “From my perspective, conversion therapy is any treatment whose goal is not necessarily the benefit of the patient, but primarily to allow him to live a heterosexual life. The only part of conversion therapy that has changed compared to the treatments they used to give is the technique. The therapeutic goal remains the same, as does the blindness to the problems that pop up along the way.

Lev Seltzer in ‘The Therapy’: ‘I’m just so petrified that [my kids are] gonna turn out the way I turned out’
Zvi Landsman, from ‘The Therapy’

“They think that if the patient seeks treatment then everything’s fine, but they ignore the reason for it, why he wants it, and they don’t grapple with what happens if he wants something different.” He gives an example from his brother: “If a patient of his were to tell him that he wants to live as a homosexual and he has a boyfriend, and would come to therapy to discuss the problems he has in the relationship, [my brother] would tell him: ‘I’m not the therapist for you; I don’t want to and cannot deal with this, go to someone else.’ But as I see it, that’s therapeutic abandonment, not therapy. Because therapy makes sure to be there for the patient even in moments like those.”

Not a yes-or-no question

This is exactly what happens to Ben Zilberman in the film. The moment he decided to come out and live as a gay man, he was rejected by his family and separated from the support system he always knew – and only then was he forced to stop his therapy. At that crucial and difficult moment, the moment his whole life turned upside down (he confesses in the film to having had suicidal thoughts at times) he was left without support. His therapist wasn’t there for him.

Landsman, however, says that along with exposing the problematic aspects of conversion therapy, it was important to him to give a platform to the therapists, as he does in the film, to listen to them and conduct a dialogue with them. “It’s important to me to have a conversation with them, because they interest me. I want to speak to them as well, not just to people who read Haaretz.”

Did you try to figure out how many such therapists there are in Israel?

“I tried, but I wasn’t able to find a number. Among other things, it’s because they are afraid to go public, so people don’t hound them. And the problem is that this only further increases their distance from other people, from us. I told the therapists in the film that I hope that through [the film] people would hear them and understand them, and perhaps also pay attention to what they are doing and saying. I committed to presenting things as they were, without painting them as extreme, so this would lead people to think about it – or not, but at least it would be real.”

Lev Seltzer explains in the film how much the therapy he went through helped him.

“On a personal level, he knows what’s right for him, and I won’t tell him what to do. But from the side, perhaps I can see things differently. I see the environmental and social traumas he suffered due to his homosexuality, and how it led to self-hatred as a gay man and to searching for any solution he could find to escape this thing. With most of us, it begins in a home that doesn’t see this as something normal, and continues as damage from our environments. So if someone tells you that you will be able to walk around without this hump on your back, why would you want to keep carrying it?”

Activists against conversion therapy celebrate the Knesset vote on the bill against the practice, from ‘The Therapy’
Zvi Landsman, from ‘The Therapy’

This conflict is heightened toward the end of the film, when the two main characters sit on opposite sides of the barricade in the runup to the Knesset vote on the bill against conversion therapy. What is your position on that law?

“I’ve decided not to express myself on the law, because it’s an attempt to take the subject of the film and make it superficial, into a yes-or-no question. I want to give people food for thought, and not give a conclusive, definitive answer to this question. I can say that I prefer the idea of dialogue over the idea of a law. I want people in Tel Aviv to talk about the problems of conversion therapy patients, and in Bnei Brak about the problems of conversion therapy dropouts.”

The people who will probably watch the film on TV and online will be primarily secular people and not Haredim.

“Not necessarily. When I posted a link to the film to the family WhatsApp group, my brother-in-law sent it to groups of sexuality therapists, religious Zionists. I was shocked to see that 100 people had opened the link within a day, which proved to me that there’s interest within Haredi society.

“When I grew up in Yeruham and the film ‘Time of Favor’ came out, it was the first time that religious people were portrayed onscreen. All the religious people went to see it, even though it was a film that said they were fanatics planning to blow up the Temple Mount. That someone was portraying them onscreen and discussing things that preoccupy them – it brought them to the theaters. I remember my excitement at seeing religious people onscreen. So one of my goals was to reach that world.

“Incidentally, the therapist who appears in the film, Eric, showed the film to his rabbi, and the rabbi was surprised that, in the film, Eric tells someone that his sexual orientation will probably not change. The rabbi said, ‘But we refer people for these treatments so that they will change.’ And Eric answered, ‘That’s what they told me at first, that within a few months it will change, and it broke me because it didn’t happen, and I thought there was something wrong with me. It’s time to stop telling people that their sexual orientation will change.’ And the rabbi answered, ‘You have to tell this to all the rabbis, people need to know this.’

“So on the other side, there’s also a desire to listen, to learn and even to use films to that end. But they have to be films that portray religious people as they really are, and not as objects for secular people to look at from the outside.”