Lia van Leer

Lia van Leer was born Lia Greenberg on August 8, 1924, in Bălți, then part of Romania and today in the Republic of Moldova.[1] She grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household; her mother volunteered for the Women's International Zionist Organization, and van Leer learned Romanian, Russian, French, German, and English during her childhood.[1][2]

In 1940, at age sixteen, her parents sent her to Palestine to visit her older sister, Bruria, a dentist living in Tel Aviv.[1] She was still there when German forces captured Bălți in July 1941. Her father was murdered with other leaders of the Jewish community, while her mother and grandmother were deported to Transnistria, where they died in camps.[1]

Van Leer moved to Jerusalem in 1943 and studied humanities at the Hebrew University for two years.[1] She later met Wim van Leer in Tel Aviv, beginning a partnership that would shape Israeli film culture for decades.[3]

Wim van Leer was a Dutch-born engineer and volunteer pilot in the 1948 War of Independence who later founded an aerial-spraying company.[1][4] He and Lia married in 1952 and made their home in Haifa, where they began developing the idea of film clubs.[1]

Finding little quality cinema available, the couple bought 16 mm prints and screened them for friends at home.[1] The gatherings grew as audiences sought films by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, and European directors that commercial distributors rarely brought to Israel. Van Leer later explained: "Here you had only commercial cinemas. You had no art cinemas. And you must remember that there was no television and no video. People had no chance to see Chaplin or Buster Keaton … or Greta Garbo. We thought we've got to bring films here because we felt it was like bringing books or paintings from a museum."[5]

The couple sought prints during trips to Europe and the United States.[6] They also traveled by jeep to kibbutzim, screening films that would otherwise have been unavailable in those communities.[1] What began as a private enthusiasm was becoming a public cultural mission.

Growing demand led Lia and Wim van Leer to establish a film club in Haifa in 1955.[7] Known as the Good Film Club, it operated at Beit Rothschild in Haifa's Carmel Center, later the site of the Haifa Cinematheque.[6] The club attracted 250 members and screened a quality film every two weeks.[2] In 1956, the couple established additional film clubs in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[7]

The van Leers did not limit themselves to urban venues. They made films available to kibbutzim and independent clubs around the country, extending access beyond Israel's major cities.[1][6] The network demonstrated the public appetite for art cinema and provided the foundation for the institutions van Leer later developed.

A pivotal moment came in 1959, when the couple attended an international film festival in Moscow. They were dismayed by Israeli entries that they regarded as coarse socialist propaganda featuring tractors and valiant factory workers.[8] At the festival, they saw French filmmaker Chris Marker's Letter from Siberia and asked him to make a film about Israel, agreeing to finance the project without retaining a veto over its content.[8] When Wim asked what would happen if the film came out anti-Israeli, Marker replied: "I don't usually do films 'against' things. Life is too short for that."[8] The resulting Description of a Struggle was shot over four weeks in spring 1960, released that year, and won the best documentary prize at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.[8]

The van Leers' growing personal collection became the foundation of the Israel Film Archive, formally established in 1960.[1] Habama dates van Leer's acceptance into the International Federation of Film Archives to that year, while the Jewish Women's Archive dates the archive's admission to the federation to 1963.[6][1]

Van Leer expanded the archive by asking film companies and Hollywood studios to deposit Hebrew-subtitled distribution prints after their commercial runs rather than destroy them. The collection eventually grew beyond 26,000 films and emphasized the preservation of Israeli features and documentaries.[1]

Its historically important Israeli holdings included the Carmel newsreels produced by Nathan Axelrod between 1934 and 1957.[1] Later accounts reported that the collection had grown to tens of thousands of films, including works produced in Israel and Palestine and copies of Jewish films from around the world.[9] In 1999, the Knesset passed the Cinema Law, requiring a copy of every film supported by an Israeli fund to be deposited in the archive and reinforcing its national preservation role.[5]

The film clubs established in the 1950s developed into formal cinematheques during the 1970s. The Haifa Cinematheque grew from the van Leers' film club, and institutions followed in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[7] Van Leer became involved in establishing the Tel Aviv Cinematheque in the early 1970s before moving to Jerusalem to pursue what became her most celebrated institutional project.[6]

The Jerusalem Cinematheque initially operated from Beit Agron. A decisive step toward a permanent home came when philanthropist George Ostrovsky offered van Leer a one-million-dollar donation for a film center inspired by the Cinémathèque Française.[6] Van Leer and Ostrovsky joined with Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, the Jerusalem Foundation, and the Van Leer Foundation to create a dedicated facility in the Hinnom Valley near the walls of the Old City.[6]

The Jerusalem Film Center opened in 1981 with screening halls, a film library, and a new home for the Israel Film Archive.[6] The Jerusalem Cinematheque screened quality films seven nights a week and developed a collection reported as comprising 30,000 films, 50,000 negatives, and 20,000 videos and cassettes, alongside a library and education department. Its Jewish-film collection was characterized as the world's largest.[7]

Van Leer managed the Jerusalem Cinematheque and its associated festival for decades. She later served as the institution's president and remained active there until her final years.[6]

Three years after the Jerusalem Film Center opened, van Leer founded the Jerusalem International Film Festival. Its first edition, held in May 1984, featured 100 films from 20 countries.[5]

The festival presented films that had not received commercial distribution in Israel and brought leading international filmmakers to the country.[6] It also gave awards to Israeli filmmakers and developed an international profile. In 1988, van Leer hosted a large Russian delegation at the festival, including producers, directors, and actors.[7]

The festival reflected van Leer's conviction that quality cinema should be available to a broad public. She described audiences as having the right to see such films and herself as having a duty to bring the films to them.[4]

Van Leer's institutions reflected a coherent belief that cinema could promote education, communication, and cultural understanding. The cinematheque, archive, library, and festival exposed audiences—particularly young people—to international cinema and provided spaces in which filmmakers and viewers could meet.[1]

Her work helped establish film as an expression of culture and art in Israel rather than merely a form of commercial entertainment or propaganda. Government agencies came to recognize and fund it accordingly.[1] Through collecting, preservation, screenings, festivals, and education, she helped raise both filmmaking and film appreciation to a new cultural status.[1]

Her approach was driven by personal vision and passion.[1] She regarded making films publicly accessible as a responsibility rather than treating her collection as a private possession.[4] As home screenings outgrew the van Leers' living room, she expanded the effort into film clubs, cinematheques, an archive, and an international festival.[1][6]

Van Leer's international standing brought invitations to serve on major festival juries. She was a member of the Cannes Film Festival jury in 1983 and later served as president of the Berlin International Film Festival jury in 1995.[1] She also served on juries at the Berlin, Chicago, and Venice film festivals.[7]

In 1998, she received an Israeli Film Academy Award for her lifetime achievements.[7] Her French honors included the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Legion of Honor, and the Ordre national du Mérite.[1][7] In 2004, she received the Israel Prize for her work advancing cinema and film appreciation in Israel.[1]

Van Leer received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2009 and a lifetime achievement honor from the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011.[6] That November, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion presented her with its President's Medallion at an academic convocation in Jerusalem.[10] She also received the Israeli President's Decoration and, around 2008, relinquished day-to-day management of the Jerusalem Cinematheque while remaining active as its president.[3][6]

Lia van Leer died at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem in March 2015, aged ninety, after becoming ill while attending the Berlin Film Festival.[3] Her husband and early institutional partner, Wim van Leer, had predeceased her. Ynet dates his death to 1991, while the Jewish Women's Archive and Encyclopedia.com give 1992.[3][1]

The institutions van Leer founded became cornerstones of Israeli film culture. The Jerusalem Cinematheque provided a permanent home for the Israel Film Archive, while the Jerusalem International Film Festival became a central institution in the development of Israeli cinema and its international connections.[1][6] The archive's role as a repository for publicly supported Israeli films was reinforced by the 1999 Cinema Law.[5]

The breadth of her work—from the first Haifa film club to formal cinematheques, an internationally affiliated archive, and an international festival—reflected decades of sustained institution-building. Her efforts preserved Israeli films, brought international cinema to local audiences, educated generations of viewers, and created meeting places for Israeli and foreign filmmakers.[1]

Van Leer's mission remained consistent from the early home screenings to her decades at the Jerusalem Cinematheque: she believed that the public had the right to watch quality films and that it was her duty to bring those films to an audience.[4] That conviction, first expressed through a 16 mm projector and a group of friends in Haifa, ultimately produced institutions that outlasted her.

The principal sources distinguish between van Leer's arrival in Palestine and her later move to Jerusalem. The Jewish Women's Archive says her parents sent her to Palestine in 1940 to visit her sister and that she moved to Jerusalem in 1943 to study at the Hebrew University. Ynet likewise dates her arrival from Romania to 1940.[1][3]

Dates associated with the Jerusalem Cinematheque refer to different institutional milestones. Encyclopedia.com dates the Cinematheque to 1973, while the Jewish Women's Archive says its permanent Jerusalem Film Center premises opened in 1981.[7][1]

Habama's memorial page contains an apparent typographical error, giving van Leer's death date as March 13, 2013, while scheduling her burial for March 16, 2015. Ynet's contemporaneous report, published March 14, 2015, confirms that she died aged ninety, supporting 2015 as the correct year.[6][3]