1999-01-01 Hebrew University Film Archives |
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By Donald H. Harrison Jerusalem (special) -- If you want to make the hearts of Marilyn Koolik, Hillel Tryster, and other Jewish film archivists race, tell them that you have found a copy of either Judea Liberated by Yaacov Ben Dov or of Adamah by Siegfried Lehmann and Helmar Lerski. Ben Dov was a pioneer Jewish filmmaker who in 1917 recorded the entrance of General Edward Allenby into Jerusalem during the World War I campaign by British forces against the Turks, and then followed Allenby throughout the rest of 1917. According to Tryster, deputy director of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at Hebrew University, the resulting film, Judea Liberated, was released in 1918.
The film, made in 1947 in pre-state Israel, was the story of a young boy who had survived the Holocaust and was transported to Palestine, where at first he was withdrawn and feeling as an outsider. A dramatic encounter with barbed wire in a farmer’s field provoked a crisis. The story was ultimately resolved with the boy realizing he indeed had a home and a substitute family in Palestine. Made on 35 mm film stock, which was comprised of flammable nitrate,
the film had been scheduled for conversion to a non-flammable 16 mm print.
But instead Hadassah’s more
Word went out seeking print copies of the film, and eventually one was
located in the Paris
While the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive cannot claim those two films for its collection, it does boast some 3,000 titles kept in 15,000 cans of film in a room with temperature and humidity controls. When it began about 30 years ago, the archive assembled films about Israel made by the World Zionist Organization and such other agencies as Hadassah and the Jewish National Fund. At that time, it was named for a wealthy Iranian Jew--Abraham F. Rad--but after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran, he was unable to keep up his involvement. At his request, the archive took his name off its letterhead. In 1988, Spielberg agreed to become the sponsor of the archive, which
focuses primarily on
Another important Holocaust collection are the documentaries collected
by Miriam Novich of
Today, all the films are on deposit at the Archive with copies available for viewing at Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Besides storing and preserving the films, the Archive helps to disseminate them by selling copies of the footage to modern day documentary and film makers. Among the most popular with the new generation of filmmakers are The Land of Promise which was made in 1935 for the Jewish National Fund, and The Illegals, which documented immigration from the displaced persons camps of Europe to Palestine after World War II. Among items that have found the way into the Archive’s collection are
newsreels, including one from the 1950s in which there were clips of Queen
Elizabeth and
President Dwight Eisenhower opening the St. Lawrence Seaway, Israeli
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion visiting a Druze village; the Satmar Rebbe
receiving visitors, and--surprise--a fashion show being conducted at the
San Diego Zoo!
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