Heroic & Hopeful
Political rhetoric aside, hope in the face of tragedy or against tremendous odds is an undoubtedly audacious notion. Many of the early Zionists who made their way to the British Mandate of Palestine embraced that bold notion as they boarded ships bound for an arid, unfamiliar land, where they risked detention and deportation.
Among them was Paul Goldman, who fled Hungary in 1940, and captured on film the labor pains that preceded the creation of the modern Jewish state in 1948. A selection of Goldman's photographs depicting the hardscrabble lives of a generation of Jewish immigrants, who came legally and illegally from Europe and the Middle East, make up "'To Return to the Land …': Paul Goldman's Photographs of the Birth of Israel." The show, which runs through May at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Battery Park City, coincides with the 60th anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence. The title of the exhibit is taken from a line of Israel's national anthem, "Hatikva."
The one-room show is not elaborate. It is composed of about three dozen black-and-white photographs, a short slide show, and a series of wall-mounted quotes from Jewish refugees living in rising cities, in makeshift transit camps, and on fledgling collective farms during the 1940s. This stark setup provides the ideal showcase for the diverse and arresting group of photographs, as well as quotes that tell of sweat and hunger, of deportation fears and random violence, during the British Mandate. "There were constant searches in the streets of Jerusalem by the British police," a woman interviewed for the exhibit is quoted as saying. "They were extremely tough and aggressive. It was very frightening."
"'To Return to the Land'" includes images of British-Army-intercepted ships filled with Jewish refugees, many of whom had survived the Holocaust; of young men and women toiling in the fields, using only rudimentary tools, and of Palestinian Arab families walking en masse toward the West Bank city of Tulkarm — having left their homes during the war of 1948. There's a photograph of a ripped-apart King David Hotel following a 1946 bombing, targeted at British offices and orchestrated by a militant group of Zionists led at the time by future Israeli Prime Minister Begin. And a now-famous portrait shows a young Israel Lau — who would later become a chief rabbi of Israel — arriving in the port city of Haifa; the boy dons a too-large coat, bearing the word Buchenwald, the concentration camp where he survived the war. A quote from Rabbi Lau above the photograph reads: "I was born twice: first in Piotrkow, and when I arrived in the Holy Land in 1945. I was eight years old."
The exhibit features images of leisure, too. There is a white-robed Tel Aviv street vendor dispensing corn to passersby during the summer, and a series of photographs that show a pudgy Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, clad in swim trunks and attempting a headstand on a sandy beach in Herzliya.
A single picture, snapped by an unknown photographer, is of Goldman, himself wearing overalls, knee-deep in a swamp, a camera in one hand and a cigarette between his lips. This unassuming-looking man was one of only a handful of photojournalists to document the audacious hopes of Jewish refugees living under the British Mandate, and in Israel, during its infancy. Yet Goldman, who died blind and penniless at age 86 in 1986, has gone pretty much uncelebrated. Many of his negatives were kept in a shoebox for years, and his oeuvre was only recently rediscovered. A not-to-be-missed selection culled from it will be on view as Israel enters its seventh decade.
Until May (36 Battery Park Place, 646-437-4202).
