While giving all due credit to big-picture film festivals like the Chicago International Film Festival and the Chicago Latino Film Festival, there’s something to be said for maintaining a tighter focus. The Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema showcases narrative features, documentaries and even a few television series from Israel. Though it’s dangerous to generalize about a culture based on a few dozen films, this year’s festival suggests a country dealing with a lot of people from diverse backgrounds living in close quarters, united by a religion that is not itself unified. The complex relations among Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism, and the often tense dealings among Jews from different parts of the world are prominent themes in many of the offerings.

Russians seem to be the go-to symbol of secularized Jewish émigrés for Israeli filmmakers. In the short “Pinchas” (showing on several different programs during the festival), young Pinchas lives with his mother, a Russian woman who drinks too much and has sex with some sleazy guy who keeps stopping by (!). Pinchas is fascinated by their neighbors, a religiously observant family who welcome him into the family circle. The filmmaker has a wonderful eye for the details of a lonely boy’s life, but the value judgments feel a bit heavy-handed. Lighter in tone is the almost ridiculously watchable television series A Touch Away (eight episodes are being shown broken into two programs repeated several times over the course of the fest), which follows two families who live in neighboring apartments. One family is ultra-Orthodox, and the other are newly arrived Russians with, shall we say, a less pious approach to life. If you smell Romeo and Juliet complications coming, you’re right. The program notes call the show “addictive,” and we have to agree.

A number of films also highlight Jewish communities in unexpected places and the challenge of assimilating into Israeli life. Two docs are particularly effective on this front. The Name My Mother Gave Me follows a group of teens in pre-army leadership training, split between Ethiopian and Russian Jews, as they travel to Ethiopia. For some of the teens, it’s a deeply emotional return to a land from which they were airlifted to escape severe anti-Semitism. The Fire Within looks at a community of Peruvians who are four or five generations removed from their Jewish roots and raises interesting questions about their motives for trying to re-enter the faith. Are these Peruvians simply trying to escape crushing poverty by emigrating to Israel? Ultimately, the filmmakers see it as an uplifting story of the endurance of the Jewish faith, but the issue remains unresolved. Like the fest films in general, its strength lies not in pat answers but in the questions it raises.

The Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema runs Thursday 29 through November 8 at the AMC Loews 600 North Michigan 9 and the Wilmette Theater. For more schedule and ticket information, go to chicagofestivalofisraelicinema.org.

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