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The Meitar Collection at the National Library of Israel, with more than 100,000 photographs of historical significance, in fact comprises three separate photographic collections, representing the work of Benno Rothenberg, Moshe Levin and Boris Carmi. These three important photographers worked in Israel from the 1940s and onwards, documenting events, landscapes, personalities, archaeological excavations and daily life in the young country.
Zvi Meitar (1933–2015), founder of the Meitar Collection, who had a keen sense for collecting and historical documentation, purchased the photo collections and copyrights from the three photographers beginning in the 1990s. In 2019, the Meitar family signed an agreement with the National Library of Israel to catalog and digitize the collection and make it accessible to the public for noncommercial purposes.
Some of the photographs are ingrained in the national collective memory, but most are being made public here for the first time, allowing a glimpse into historical events from surprising and unfamiliar angles.
Benno Rothenberg was born in 1914 in Frankfurt, Germany, to a Hasidic family. He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1933 and shortly thereafter began his academic studies. After studying mathematics, philosophy and archaeology, he took up photography in 1945, and never stopped.
In 1947–1948, Rothenberg photographed Israel’s War of Independence. In 1952, he joined an archaeological expedition in the Negev as a photographer. Following the Sinai Campaign (1956), he conducted an archaeological survey in Sinai, and in 1964, he led an excavation expedition to Timna. He was awarded the Eilat Prize for his book Secrets of the Negev [Hebrew], summarizing 15 years of research.
The Benno Rothenberg Archive documents the first decades of the State of Israel, including the declaration of the country’s independence, illegal Jewish immigration, the detention camps in Cyprus, immigrant camps in Yemen, abandoned Arab villages in Israel, transit camps, kibbutzim and moshavim, battles and defensive operations of the Haganah and the IDF, as well as war-time and everyday life. In addition, the archive includes comprehensive documentation of major archaeological expeditions in Israel and Spain, which Rothenberg, an archaeologist and photographer, participated in and even headed.
Moshe Levin was born in 1921 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1947, he and his wife Betty (Schoffman) immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. He worked as a journalist for several newspapers, radio and television networks, and in 1958, he founded the Time-Life news bureau in Jerusalem. Serving as the magazine’s reporter until his retirement in 1990, Levin also contributed to 27 books in the Time-Life series. In addition, Levin was the author of Balm in Gilead and It Takes a Dream.
Moshe Levin’s archive of photographs is a special gem within the Meitar Collection due to his color images documenting the establishment of the State of Israel (1947–1953) and other important historical events alongside those of the country’s landscapes and various locations.
Among the events documented in the archive: the blockade of Jerusalem, the ceremony establishing the IDF, the first Independence Day of the State of Israel, the Sinai Campaign, the Yom Kippur War, the construction of the Israel Museum, the funeral of David Ben-Gurion, Sadat’s visit and more. A large portion of the photographs were taken in Jerusalem but also in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, the Golan Heights, the Galilee, the Negev, Sinai and the Gaza Strip, among other places. Levin also documented Operation Attila in Cyprus and an archaeological expedition in Syria.
Boris Winograd, later Carmi, was born in Russia in 1914, and in his teens, he moved in with a relative in Warsaw, Poland. Soon after, he went to study in a boarding school in Germany. In 1933, he traveled to Italy and after a few months, moved on to France. He developed his interest in photography while studying ethnography at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1936, Carmi moved to Danzig and then to Mandatory Palestine in 1939, where he first worked in agriculture, but quickly turned to photography. During World War II, Carmi enlisted in the British Army and served as a cartographic photographer in Egypt and Italy. During his service, he met the Berlin photographer Hans Haim Finn, who enriched his knowledge of photojournalism.
Following his discharge from the British army, Carmi enlisted in the Haganah as a cartographic photographer and eventually became the photographer for the IDF magazine Bamaḥane. At the same time, he worked as a professional photographer and was a member of a group of mainly German-Jewish photographers in Tel Aviv that included Benno Rothenberg, Hans Haim Finn, Fritz Cohen, Heinz Kaufman and Paul Goldman. From 1952 to 1976, Carmi worked for the daily Davar newspaper and its weekly supplement Davar Hashavua. He worked as a photographer until his death in 2002.
Boris Carmi’s photograph archive consists of documentary photographs from the first decades following the establishment of the State of Israel. Carmi documented many events, including wars and military operations, the waves of immigration to Israel, the transit camps, the kibbutzim and the moshavim. He also documented much of the Israeli cultural world.
Zvi Meitar (1933–2015) was an accomplished lawyer, and held a master’s degree in law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1962, he established the Meitar Law Offices, which he headed until 2001. For twelve years, Meitar served as chair of the Bar Association’s Tel Aviv district committee and was a member of the judicial selection committee. He was a founding member of the Aurec Group, which owned a number of companies, including Dapei Zahav, Maximedia Arutzei Zahav, and Amdocs, an Israeli high-tech pioneer. In 2004, he founded the Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Fund, a philanthropic foundation that is still active today.
In addition to the photographs in the Meitar Collection now available on the National Library of Israel website, for over 40 years Zvi Meitar collected hundreds of documents and manuscripts, the earliest of which dates to 1501. The collection includes documents and letters of Zionist leaders and icons of Hebrew culture, such as Herzl, Dreyfus, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion, Arlosoroff, Weizmann, Dizengoff, Leah Goldberg, Bialik, and Tchernichovsky. In addition, the collection includes documents signed by world-famous generals and statesmen such as Napoleon, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Louis XIV, Cromwell, Richelieu, Bismarck, Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Philip II, Churchill, Wellington, Queen Victoria, Lord Allenby and Lawrence of Arabia. The collection of documents is a fascinating historical mosaic that serves as fertile ground for research and study.
In 2008, Zvi Meitar published the book Controversies: 60 Momentous Debates in the Hebrew Press from 1918 to 2008 [Hebrew], which presents political and social controversies that shook the Jewish Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in the Land of Israel) and the citizens of the State of Israel, from the British occupation (1919) to the disengagement from Gaza (2005). Edited by Avi Katzman and with illustrations by Dana Nechmad, the book presents the controversies as reflected in articles, news items and essays printed over the years in more than 50 different newspapers.
Over the years, the Zvi and Ofra Meitar Family Fund has donated to many institutions, students and projects in Israel and abroad, mainly in the fields of education and culture. Among its recipients are Tel Aviv University, the Israel Opera, the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society in Musrara, Jerusalem, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC), Oxford University, the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Zvi Meitar was born in Tel Aviv and was a member of the Tel Aviv branch of the Scouts organization. He was a squad commander and officer in the Golani Brigade. He received a variety of honorary degrees from universities, museums and cultural institutions in Israel and around the world during his lifetime. Married to his wife Ofra for 58 years, he fathered a son and a daughter and was the proud grandfather to six grandchildren and a great-grandson.
