Sacha Baron Cohen’s Habo connection

TALI FEINBERG

Another claim to fame for the British actor is his involvement in the Habonim Dror youth movement as a teenager. The result is that many current and former members of Habonim are just “six degrees” of separation from him.

The connection is so close that Baron Cohen’s nephew was a madrich (camp counsellor) at Habonim Dror Southern Africa’s machaneh (camp) at the end of last year.

Others have childhood memories of the actor. “He grew up on my road. It’s weird to think we used to take the same bus home in Hampstead all those years ago,” says a member of the Cape Town Jewish community who lived in England in her youth, but asked not to be named.

Richard Summers says, “I went through all my years in the movement in Habonim in the United Kingdom (HDUK) with Sacha and his brother Eran.”

Lindi Giger Rudnicki remembers Baron Cohen from when their paths crossed while they were with Habonim in Israel – both on gap years – in 1990. “He and his friend Adam were on Kibbutz Tuval when we were there, and we had a seminar together. He was very down to earth.”

A friend from Cape Town, Martine Alperstein, who now lives in Israel, also remembers Baron Cohen from that time.She says, “We just knew him as Sacha Cohen. He was living on Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra. He was a very funny but ordinary guy back then.” She adds that her colleague in Israel remembers busking on the streets of London with Baron Cohen in their youth.

A former shaliach (emissary) of Habonim Dror Southern Africa, Moshe Lederman, interacted with Baron Cohen when the latter was a leader of the youth movement. Lederman was Habonim Dror UK shaliach at the time. He shared a video of a young man’s aliya (immigration to Israel) farewell ceremony, with Baron Cohen in it, and his  appearance has hardly changed.

Belinda Geffen Copitch, formerly of Cape Town but who now lives in the UK, says she was a madricha of Baron Cohen’s older brother, Amnon, in London. Gabi Katz Kurtz said that when Baron Cohen’s parents were in Melbourne, friends of hers organised to get a photograph of the actor signed and dedicated to her son, who is also an actor.

The Times of Israel (TOI) spoke to people who knew Baron Cohen back when he was becoming a successful comedian in 2012. “I remember being on the bus during our Habonim Mahaneh Lomdim trip, and he did this stand up bit about lost property at the front of the bus,” said one woman now living in Ra’anana. She attended a three-week seminar with Baron Cohen in Israel when they were graduating high school.

“He was very nerdy. He didn’t hang out with the girls, but we were literally crying from laughter because he was so funny. I remember thinking how talented he was, and smart – a genius, really.”

The son of an Israeli mother and Welsh father, “a quirky, smart family”, according to the woman, Baron Cohen grew up in West London, and was active throughout high school in Habonim. “He was very Zionist, very involved in Habo,” said a fellow Israel-Seminar participant, who has known him since they were babies in the same mother-and-baby group. “He wasn’t Mr Cool Guy.”

It was at Cambridge University, however, where Baron Cohen read history, that he began his stage career, first as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, a production of the university’s amateur dramatic club, according to TOI.

“I knew who Sacha was from London, his brother Eran was my age, and they were all in Habo,” said a woman named Debbie, who now lives in Israel and played Yente the matchmaker to Baron Cohen’s Tevye. “It was a fun production, and he did this thing that I noticed later on as I watched his career unfold. He was always in character. When he signed my programme, he signed it ‘Tevye’, which was annoying because I could have [later] sold it on eBay.”

In fact, when Baron Cohen created the character Borat, it became a hit in Israel because the “Kazakh” he speaks in the movie is in fact perfect Hebrew, reported The Guardian at the time that the film The Dictator was being screened. The film is peppered with Hebrew expressions, Israeli slang, and inside jokes only Israelis could truly appreciate.

A fair amount of ink has been spilt asking whether Baron Cohen’s acting training ground was, in fact, Habonim. In the unauthorised biography of the actor by Kathleen Tracy, a spokesperson from Habonim said, “We think Habonim is where he got his craziness. The confidence to speak out and feel comfortable in a crowd, that’s what Habonim would have given Sacha.”

In an article titled “The comedy gang: the Jewish youth group that made Sacha Baron Cohen” in The Independent in 2011, fellow movement members share how the performing of “skits” and improvisation was the ideal environment to produce comedians.

“It gave us the space and encouragement to be creative,” says fellow comedian Ivor Baddiel. “Being given the freedom to improvise together as a team was important for me. If you are going to chuck out comedy ideas to a group of collaborators, you have to develop the confidence that you are in a safe place where the others won’t rubbish you. Otherwise you will clam up. I learnt that at Habonim. It was somewhere I could be myself and be funny.”

Now that Baron Cohen has moved onto more serious acting in The Spy, it seems he has gone full circle, back to his youth, when Israel was central to his identity. “I saw Eli Cohen, as he was written in the show, as an extreme version of myself,” Baron Cohen said recently, as reported by the New York Times. “The stakes were higher for him because the price of failure was imprisonment and execution. Eli Cohen was, in that sense, the greatest method actor of the last century.”