Head down to Lower Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage and see Uri Dan’s photographs of the Yom Kippur War and the historic crossing of the Suez Canal by forces under the command of Ariel Sharon. You will be transported to three long, brutal, weeks in October 1973.As a member of Mr. Sharon’s command staff during the war, Mr. Dan, now a correspondent for the New York Post, witnessed Reserve Armored Division 143 fight on the Egyptian front and cross the Suez Canal in a daring maneuver that turned the tide of war to victory.

With a Nikon camera exhibited in the show, Mr. Dan captured the human toll amid battlefield wreckage: the haunting look of an Israeli colonel who lost comrades; an Israeli general welcoming a high-ranking Egyptian prisoner of war; young Israeli soldiers napping despite heavy artillery shelling; and daily life among soldiers showering and shaving outdoors in the sun.

The origin of the show is unusual. Two months prior to the 20th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the newspaper Maariv asked Mr. Dan for photographic material. After Mr. Dan gave the film to a lab in Tel Aviv, gallery owner Aharon Farkash saw the photos and was surprised, since he knew Mr. Dan as a journalist, not a photographer. Mr. Dan’s son, Oron Uri, who is now roughly the same age as his father was during the Yom Kippur War, describes his father as a photographer who “didn’t bother to develop the pictures.” Mr. Farkash held a show – Mr. Sharon came the opening. Selected photos from the show now appear at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through February 27.

The most striking photos in the show capture the magnetic presence of Mr. Dan’s longtime friend and fellow soldier, Mr. Sharon. Whether resting alone on a dune in isolation or speaking into a radio microphone with his head bandaged, Mr. Sharon’s electric energy fills these photos. “When he walks, you think he’s a giant,” Mr. Dan said.

Mr. Dan gave a private tour of the show to Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, and Messrs. Dan and Gillerman stood discussing Mr. Sharon’s height, in front of a large blown-up photo of him taken during his days as a general, instructing an Israeli commanding colonel amid the dust of midday battle.

Mr. Dan knows this subject well, for he had earlier accompanied the 28-year-old Mr. Sharon, then commander of a paratroop battalion, in parachuting over the Mitleh Pass behind Egyptian lines in October 1956 to help defeat the Egyptian army.

The show’s highlight is a group of photos showing discussion and disagreement in broad daylight among the green-outfitted generals. This was the so-called war of the generals. The scene has a kind of biblical dimension in Kodachrome.

Near the exhibit entrance is a photograph of Mr. Dan that he asked another soldier to take. This act of self-portraiture was spurred by his having felt his lens had become a “curse” when some of those photographed died in battle. He lost his 20-year-old cousin in the war. Viewed at eye level and accompanied by narrative quotations from soldiers, the exhibit documents a war in which fathers fought alongside sons.

A heart-rending account of Captain Rami Matan reads: “An hour before the battle, one of my soldiers asked to speak to me. He says, ‘I want you to promise that I will return from the battle.’ Remember, I am a kid of 22, and he is 20, but I am his company commander. What can I say? They don’t teach this in any leadership courses. I took him aside and said, ‘Look, we got through last week, and we’ll get through tonight.

You’ll hear me on the radio, and you can depend on me.’ The end of the story is clear. He didn’t make it home. He was killed at the Chinese Farm. And now a kind of stone presses on my heart for the rest of my life.”

Battles have made Mr. Dan pray a couple times. Is he religious? “Regretfully, I am secular.” His grandfather was a rabbi in Salonika and his father moved to Palestine in 1933 and worked in agriculture, where he met his Polish wife. His father couldn’t speak Polish or Yiddish and his mother could speak neither Ladino nor Greek, so the couple spoke Hebrew at home.

The arc of Mr. Dan’s journalistic career began with reading Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht’s “A Child of the Century” in Tel Aviv. Asked if he has advice for younger journalists: “Apologize when you’re wrong” and most importantly, “correct immediately.” CBS newsman Dan Rather, he said, took too long to apologize.

Mr. Dan studied at the Technion, and went on to have many adventures covering prime ministers, kings, and Israeli figures. He once sat with Moshe Dayan in an armored personal carrier as Egyptian bombers fired overhead. Mr. Dan took off his helmet and told Dayan, who was wearing only a cap, “You should have this helmet.” Moshe looks at me with one eye, and says, ‘In this war, everyone for himself.'”

In 1981, Mr. Dan told Menachem Begin that when the latter was head of the opposition to David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Shin Bet (an organization similar to the Secret Service) planted a microphone in the wall of Begin’s headquarters behind a picture of Vladimir Jabotinsky. “Now that you’re already prime minister and entering your second term, it’s time to bring out this file,” Mr. Dan recalls telling Begin. “Mr. Dan,” Begin replied gentlemanly, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I don’t believe that such underhanded” things were done.

Mr. Dan has covered fighting in Cyprus, Vietnam, and Kosovo.

“Reporting is in my blood,” he said, describing himself as an empiricist, “running to all these places.” Regarding Mr. Sharon, Mr. Dan is considered by some to be prophetic. Since Mr. Sharon had been on every front line – 1956, 1967, 1973, Lebanon – Mr. Dan said he knew he would be prime minister “because I had seen him under the light of bombs” on the battlefield. In a February 13, 1981, New York Times article, Mr. Dan was quoted as saying those who did not accept him as defense minister would have to accept him as prime minster.

Since Mr. Dan served as press adviser to Mr. Sharon in the 1980s during his tenure as defense minister, some of Mr. Dan’s critics say he is not objective about Mr. Sharon. This view of him was disputed several weeks ago by the editor of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky, in remarks at the opening of the exhibit of Mr. Dan’s photographs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. “Uri Dan,” he said, “was one of those who taught me – and, no doubt, others – that it’s okay for a newspaperman to have heroes. In fact, if one is unable to acknowledge heroes, one is, at times, unable to tell the full story of his or her times.”

Mr. Dan himself said Mr. Sharon reminded him of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If,” which concludes:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With 60 seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And which is more you’ll be a Man, my son!