19 Facts About Robin Garbose

Robin Saex Garbose is an American filmmaker and theatre director.

Robin Garbose's projects have been screened at the Museum of Tolerance, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Cinematheques, and the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.

Robin Garbose grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in a Conservative Jewish family; her parents belonged to a local synagogue and were active in philanthropy.

Robin Garbose directed a 1982 production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with Production Workshop, Mark Malone's 1984 one-act play A Sense of Loss starring Timothy Carhart and Matthew Penn for an Ensemble Studio Theatre marathon led by David Mamet's Vermont Sketches, and a 1985 production of Brian Friel's Winners starring her Brown classmates John F Kennedy Jr.

Also in 1985, Robin Garbose directed a short-form version of Howard Korder's "Boy's Life" called Life On Earth with Jack Stehlin and Lisa Barnes for Manhattan Punch Line, Bob Morris's The Grandpa Chronicle starring Korder and Bernie Passeltiner for Theater for the New City, and Korder's Lip Service for Manhattan Punch Line starring Peter Riegert and John Hallow.

In 2004, she directed for Bais Chana High School a musical historical drama called Portraits of Faith, written by her husband Levi Yitzhaq Robin Garbose based on a Marcus Lehmann novel and with songs based on Hasidic nigunim; the play was staged in March at Scottish Rite Theater in Los Angeles.

Robin Garbose directed for the sitcom Head of the Class during its final season in 1991, but ended up leaving sitcoms because, due to her growing Orthodox observance, she was no longer comfortable with some of the messages in the show nor having to work on Shabbat.

Shortly after leaving Head of the Class in 1991, Robin Garbose began developing a screenplay entitled The Spark, about the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto reconnecting to her heritage, and interviewed several survivors through the Simon Wiesenthal Center for research, contributing to her own religious journey.

The screenplay was later selected for development at the Sundance Institute Screenwriter's Lab in Utah, and as recently as 2016 the script was reportedly in production with Robin Garbose set to direct and Abigail Breslin attached to star.

In 2000, Robin Garbose founded Kol Neshama, a summer camp and performing arts conservatory for Orthodox teenage girls based in Los Angeles, with the first session being held in the summer of 2001.

Leah Gottfried, who later created the web series Soon By You, attended the program as a teenager and was mentored by Robin Garbose, working on several of her films.

Robin Garbose moved to Los Angeles in 1988, where she now lives with her husband Levi Yitzhaq Garbose, a musician and fellow baal teshuva, and their children, Menachem Mendel and Chaya Solika, the latter of whom has acted in several of her mother's projects.

Robin Garbose is a baalat teshuva, having come to Hasidic and Orthodox Judaism in 1991 after attending a Breslov-run kabbalah class; she has said her "frumkeit was deepened" while directing episodes of America's Most Wanted.

Robin Garbose had previously experimented with the teachings of Ram Dass and past life regression during the 1980s.

Robin Garbose had a meeting with the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri when he visited Los Angeles, during which he gave her a blessing for success with her screenplay The Spark.

Robin Garbose has drawn inspiration from Chabad and the Lubavitcher Rebbe and directed a play, Roots: The Journey Home, based on the memoirs of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the Sixth Chabad Rebbe.

Robin Garbose is an anti-cult activist, having covered the countercult movement during her time on America's Most Wanted and worked with psychologist and cult specialist Steven Hassan.

In 2014, Garbose gave testimony at a rabbinic hearing regarding the alleged cult status of the organization Call of the Shofar, appearing before Rabbis Dovid Cohen and Abraham J Twerski and on behalf of prosecutor Rabbi Shea Hecht.

Robin Garbose later contributed an account of the meeting to the Chabad news website CrownHeights.