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. 

“It appears that the negative was actually purchased by Levin Epstein of a famous publishing house sometime in 1919 and apparently taken to the States,” said Tryster who is deputy at the archives to Koolik  .  What happened to the negative after that, “we just don’t know,” he said. “The positive of that film went to London and then to South Africa and was the subject of a lawsuit in the mid-20s, but the final outcome of what happened to the film print is not known now.“ Tryster believes “there is a possibility, a strong possibility, that the negative went to the States and maybe more prints were struck from that.”  For the archivists, the story of Adamah‘s disappearance is just as heart-breaking. The film was a collaboration between

Hillel Tryster

Lehmann, who was the founder of the Ben Shemen Youth Village, and Lerski, a European cinematographer and director. 

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was the story of a young boy who had survived the Holocaust and was transported to Palestine, where at first he was withdrawn and feeling as an outsider.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 
commercial version of the story, Tomorrow’s A Wonderful Day, was converted to 16 mm 
instead. The 35 mm version was stored at Ben Shemen, where it spontaneously ignited in 
1960, burning down the youth village’s dining room in the process. 

Word went out seeking print copies of the film, and eventually one was located in the Paris 
offices of the Jewish National Fund. That was sent to Tel Aviv’s national film laboratory 
where five minutes of Adamah  was copied and the quality determined to be poor. The 
project temporarily was put aside.  Ironically, a fire broke out in a bank on a floor above the 
National Film Laboratory, and the water used to extinguish the blaze damaged the laboratory and destroyed the last known print.

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 
collecting Jewish documentary films including some having to do with the Holocaust. Because of this, the archive often is confused with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation which Spielberg created to record testimonies of Holocaust Survivors. But, in fact, the two enterprises are completely independent of each other. Among the Holocaust footage included in the archive is the entire trial of  Adolf Eichmann, the nazi architect of the Holocaust. The trial was videotaped, not filmed, and as a point of historic trivia, Tryster informs that “it was the first time that video was used for news purposes anywhere in the world.  Up to that point, video had been used only for entertainment in the States, so they could tape a program and do it on both coasts without having to go live twice.” 

Another important Holocaust collection are the documentaries collected by Miriam Novich of 
Israel’s Ghetto Fighters’ House (Beit Lohamei Haghetaot). “She went around in the late 
40s collecting anywhere that she could any documentation on film that had to do with the 
Holocaust,” Tryster said. “The collection she built up in terms of Holocaust films was 
rivalled only by Yad Vashem.” 

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!