Uri Zohar

Uri Zohar in They Call Me Shmil

Uri Zohar was born in Tel Aviv. His parents were Polish Jewish immigrants.[2] 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.[3]

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.[4] In the late 1970s, under the influence of Yitzhak Shlomo Zilberman, Zohar turned to religion, becoming a Haredi Orthodox Jew and a rabbi.[5]

He was a close friend of Arik Einstein, with whom he made some of his most noted films. Einstein’s two daughters married Zohar’s sons.[6]

Zohar was one of the founding members of Ma'ale Amos. Later, he resided in Jerusalem.[7]

He died at the age of 86 on 2 June 2022.[8] 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.[2]

Uri Zohar at the microphone, performing with the Lool group for soldiers during the Yom Kippur War (1973)

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.[9] In the 1960s, Zohar directed and starred in Israeli films, among them Hole in the Moon, Three Days and a Child, Every Bastard a King, 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).[10] When Israel Television went on air, he became a program host and appeared in commercials.[2][9]

Zohar as a rabbi

In 1977, he began wearing a kippa on the television game show he was hosting.[4] 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.[11][9] He became active in the movement to attract secular Jews to religious orthodoxy, and used his entertainment skills to promote this objective.[12] In the 1992 Israeli elections, Zohar directed the television broadcasts for the Shas party.[13] 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 filmmmakers Dani Rosenberg and Yaniv Segalovich to make it, and Rosenberg and Segalovich in turn made a documentary about him.[14][15]

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."[11]

In 1976 he was awarded the Israel Prize for cinema, which he declined.[16] 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.[17]

• My Friends, We Were Robbed[18]
• Waking Up Jewish[19]

• The True Story of Palestine (1962)
• Hole in the Moon (1964)
• Moishe Ventalator (1966)
• Three Days and a Child (1967)
• Every Bastard a King (1968)
• Hitromamut (1970)
• The Hero (1971)
• Metzitzim (1973)
• Ha-Tarnegol (1973)[20]
• Big Eyes (1974)
• Hatzilu Et HaMatzil (1977)[21]

• 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