Uri Zohar

Uri Zohar (Hebrew: אורי זוהר‎ [ˈuʁi ˈzoaʁ]; 4 November 1935 – 2 June 2022) was an Israeli film director, actor, comedian and rabbi.^[1]A major figure of the New Sensibility movement in Israeli cinema, he became one of the country's most prolific and prominent filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s.^[1]He was named a recipient of the Israel Prize for Cinema in 1976, but he declined to accept the award.

Zohar was born and raised in Tel Aviv. He moved to Jerusalem and studied philosophy at university. As a filmmaker, he rose to prominence with his first full-length feature Hole in the Moon (1964).^[1] Three Days and a Child (1967) was nominated for the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.^[2]

His drama, Every Bastard a King (1968) was a major box office success.^[3] He later directed the celebrated comedy Metzitzim (Peeping Toms) (1972), and was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival.^[4]

In the mid-70s he started to become religious, eventually emerging as one of Israel's most prominent Baal teshuva figures^[4]. He eschewed his entertainment career by 1978 and became a Haredi rabbi.^[5][4]

Uri Zohar was born in Tel Aviv. His parents were Polish Jewish immigrants.^[6] In 1952, he graduated high school and did his military service in an army entertainment troupe. His first marriage, to singer Ilana Rovina, ended in divorce.^[7]

In 1960, he studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was sentenced to three months of community service on charges of marijuana possession.^[8] In the late 1970s, under the influence of Yitzhak Shlomo Zilberman, Zohar turned to religion, becoming a Haredi Orthodox Jew and a rabbi.^[9]

Zohar was one of the founding members of Ma'ale Amos. Later, he resided in Jerusalem.^[10]

After his discharge from the army, Zohar became one of the founding members of the theatre and entertainment troupe Batzal Yarok, which was popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.^[11]

Asa an actor, he had early film roles in the Larry Frisch picture Pillar of Fire (1959), Raphael Nussbaum's Burning Sands (1960).^[12] He also had a minor role in Otto Preminger's Hollywood epic Exodus, about the founding of the State of Israel.^[12] He also had a role in Ulai Terdu Sham (Dreamboat) (1964), which is regarded as a pivotal film in Tel Aviv cinema.^[13]

In 1962, he co-directed the documentary film The True Story of Palestine (Etz O Palestina) with Nathan Axelrod and Joel Silberg. The film charts the lives of the Yishuv, the Jewish community residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.^[14]

In 1964, he directed and starred in his first full-length feature film, Hole in the Moon. It is considered the first film of the New Sensibility movement in Israeli cinema and is regarded as a classic.^[12][1] It tells the story of new Jewish migrants to the State of Israel, who create an imaginary cinematic city in the Negev desert.^[12] It was screened at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival as part of International Critics' Week.^[15][16]

In 1967, he directed Three Days and a Child, a modernist adaptation of a short story of the same name by A. B. Yehoshua. It was nominated for the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.^[2] The film's star, Oded Kotler won the award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.^[17]

This was followed by Every Bastard a King (1968), a critical and commercial hit.^[3] It became one of the most successful box office hits in Israeli cinema history. It was seen by an estimated 743,000 people.^[3]

In 1971, he co-directed the British-Israeli drama film, Bloomfield (AKA The Hero) with actor Richard Harris. It tells the story of an ageing football player in Tel Aviv who navigates his final match and his love for Nira (Romy Schneider).^[18]

He also directed Big Eyes and Metzitzim. He directed 11 full-length films as well as a number of short movies and episodes of the television series "Lool" (Chicken Coop).^[19] When Israel Television went on air, he became a program host and appeared in commercials.^[6][11]

In 1977, he began wearing a kippa on the television game show he was hosting.^[8] In the same year, he directed his final mainstream feature film, Save the Lifeguard (Hatzilu Et HaMatzil).

He eventually withdrew entirely from Israel's popular culture scene to become a Haredi Jew and began to study in yeshiva. He became a rabbi in Jerusalem and immersed himself in Biblical scholarship.^[20][11] He became active in the movement to attract secular Jews to religious orthodoxy, and used his entertainment skills to promote this objective.^[21]

In 1985, he appeared in Renen Schorr's short film Wedding in Jerusalem, which documents the wedding of Zohar's son Ephraim to Alona, daughter of Arik Einstein.^[22]

In the 1992 Israeli elections, Zohar directed the television broadcasts for the Shas party.^[23] He later directed a film about a successful dancer who embraces orthodox Judaism, mirroring his own story. The film was a success with Ultra-Orthodox audiences. Zohar had enlisted the help filmmakers Dani Rosenberg and Yaniv Segalovich to make it, and Rosenberg and Segalovich in turn made a documentary about him, Zohar: The Return (2018).^[24][25][1]

When asked in an interview about how he regarded his former career in entertainment, Zohar said that "I respect it, the way a mature adult remembers his childhood. But there's no escaping the fact that I was a child."^[20]

In 1976 he was awarded the Israel Prize for cinema, which he declined.^[26] In 2012, Cinémathèque Française in Paris held a retrospective of Zohar's work. The event included lectures and screenings of all his major films. Zohar was described as one of Israel's most interesting film directors due to his exploration of manhood and machismo, male-female relationships and the impact of the military.^[27]

In the early 1960s, Zohar was married to the singer Ilana Rovina for about two years. Later he married Alia Shuster, an actress who starred in the movie "Big Eyes" that he directed.^[28]

Zohar and Alia, who lived in Jaffa after getting married and later became religiously observant and moved to Jerusalem, had seven children.

He was a close friend of Arik Einstein, with whom he made some of his most noted films. Einstein's two daughters, Shiri and Yasmin, married Zohar's sons, Ephraim Fisher and Shalom.^[29] The wedding of Ephraim Fishel and Shiri was documented in Renan Shor's 1985 short film "A Wedding in Jerusalem." Another son, Itamar, who became secular, initiated the 2004 three-part series "Looking Inside" - a series in which Itamar examines the two worlds his father lived in, and they debate matters of faith, values and reconciliation between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. After several years Itamar returned to religious observance. The series was filmed in their Jerusalem home, as well as locations where Zohar lived and worked in Tel Aviv. Another son, Betzalel, managed the Migdal Or institutions of Rabbi Yitzhak David Grossman. The youngest son, David, is a Jerusalem city council member representing the United Torah Judaism party. Zohar's only daughter, Ahinoam, is the subject of the song "Ahinoam Doesn't Know," which appeared on Erik Einstein's album "Pozy."

Rabbi Uri Zohar died on June 2, 2022, at the age of 86, after suffering a heart attack at his home in Jerusalem's Romema neighborhood. The funeral procession left from the home he lived in, accompanied by many mourners. He was buried in Har HaMenuchot cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.^[30][31] He was survived by his second wife Eliya Shuster, a former actress who had participated in a film he directed, their seven children and numerous grandchildren.^[6]

• My Friends, We Were Robbed^[35]
• Waking Up Jewish^[36]

• Cinema of Israel

• Excerpt from My Friends, We Were Robbed
• Uri Zohar's official website (in Hebrew)
• Uri Zohar: The Inventor of Modern Israeli Cinema
• Archived speeches on TorahAnytime.com
• Uri Zohar on National Israel News