Israel’s photo album

 

A million images and a film tell the story of Israel’s most famous photographer.

 

Israel’s chronicler – that’s the name given to Rudi Weissenstein. He recorded Israel’s history in images and created the country’s largest photo archive. And one photo in particular made him world famous: Ben Gurion standing beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl between two Israeli flags and declaring the independence of the State of Israel. Weissenstein was the only photographer who was allowed to attend the solemn occasion on 14 May 1948. Alongside many others, the image is now on display in the exhibition “Ihr glücklichen Augen” (You happy eyes) in Cologne.

Shimon Rudolph Weissenstein was born on 17 February 1910 in Iglau, a small town between Prague and Vienna. He grew up in a good middle-class family, his mother a pianist, his father the owner of a carton box factory. As a young man Weissenstein went to Vienna and completed an apprenticeship there as a book printer. It was his father, a keen amateur photographer, who kindled his son’s interest in the medium.

When it became clear that European Jewry was threatened by the Nazis, Weissenstein started planning to emigrate to Palestine. He managed to leave Vienna on New Year’s Eve 1935.

 

For him, Palestine was more than just a safe haven. The 25-year-old believed firmly in the future of the Jewish state and dedicated his talents to helping build the country. He photographed people and street scenes and the workers in the kibbutzim, the sea, and the desert and a kind of acacia that came to fame thanks to his images. He documented the creation of Tel Aviv with its buildings and streets in the Bauhaus style, and Rothschild Boulevard, close to which, in 1940, he opened the Pri-Or Photohouse, also erected in the Bauhaus style. The photo journalist from Vienna was already so well known that celebrities from the worlds of politics and art came to the Pri-Or to have their portraits taken: Golda Meir, Marc Chagall, Max Brod, Eleanor Roosevelt, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and many others. Word had it that “If you’re exhibited in the display windows at Pri-Or you’ll win the next elections.”

 

Weissenstein’s most famous photo, showing the Declaration of Independence in 1948, is indicative of his hope and his lifework. The immigrant from Vienna captured the optimism of a society that grew together from people of all nations and created its own identity. Yet the 1948 photo remained his only political one; he was not a political reporter. Instead, he was always interested in art and culture, and revered great literary figures such as Heine and Goethe. From 1936 onwards he accompanied the Palestine Orchestra, which later became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded by European immigrants. Weissenstein took photographic portraits of famous conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Rubinstein, Sergiu Celibidache and Yehudi Menuhin, who worked with the orchestra.

 

Wherever photos by Israel’s chronicler are shown, the image of a beautiful young woman with long dark hair can also be seen, whose powerful jump into the sky over Tel Aviv still fascinates observers even decades later. It depicts Miriam, Weissenstein’s wife, aged 27. She too had fled Vienna with her family in the 1930s, where she had already become a well-known dancer and acrobat.

The multi-award-winning documentary film “Life in stills” by Tamar Tal shows Miriam, now 96 years old, facing the challenge of saving her husband’s archive. She continued it after his death in 1992 and kept it accessible to the public, above all to academics and journalists. There are around a million negatives sorted according to topic in wooden drawers. Many of them have still not been viewed. The documentary follows Miriam and her grandson Ben Peter as they struggle to save the Photohouse and the listed building in which it is located from falling victim to a large apartment building project. It is a gripping David and Goliath story, with a happy ending: The Pri-Or survived, albeit at a new address.

The story of the 96-year-old Miriam and her committed grandson has refocussed attention on the work of Rudi Weissenstein. His light, optimistic black-and-white photos from the 1930s to the 1970s even feature with a melancholy bent in a current Israeli Pop video. For the young generation they express the longing for an Israel that no longer exists.

 

Rudi Weissenstein, who had to serve in the Czech Army and saw how Nazism made refugees of millions of people, never photographed war. He preferred to invoke in his images the vision of a peaceful future. His gravestone in Tel Aviv bears a quotation from Goethe, whom he revered so much: “Ihr glücklichen Augen, was je ihr gesehn – es sei, wie es wolle, es war doch so schön” (You happy eyes, whatever you see, no matter what it is, it is always fair to me).