Uri Zohar

Zohar was born in Tel Aviv in November 1935 to Polish immigrant parents; his birth name was Uri Zadok.[2][5] He served in an Israel Defense Forces entertainment troupe and later studied philosophy at the Hebrew University.[2] His military service brought him into the Nahal entertainment band, where he worked with Chaim Topol before the two helped establish a civilian musical-comedy company after their national service.[1]

That company, Batzal Yarok, or “Green Onion,” brought together graduates of army entertainment and became successful in the late 1950s.[1][4] Its hit songs included “Adoni ha-Shofet” (“Your Honor”) and “Venezuela.”[1] Shaike Ofir helped with the troupe's sketches, and Zohar's subsequent career continued to combine songs, comedy, and collaboration with other performers.[4] At the end of the decade, Zohar also co-founded the production company Hateatron Ha'amami and performed music in Jaffa.[4]

His early stage persona included the improvised question “Am I beautiful?”, which became associated with his appearances before audiences.[6] In a later interview, he explained that he had adopted it as a professional gimmick after noticing that it worked with an audience.[6] He also performed songs with singer Ilana Rubina, then his wife, including “Shir HaPatentim” and the hit “HaHofesh BeBeit Havarah.”[5] Their marriage ended in divorce after two years.[5]

After Batzal Yarok disbanded in 1960, Zohar developed his comedy career through collaborations with artists including Shaike Ofir and writer Haim Hefer, while expanding into radio, cinema, and eventually television.[1] Although chiefly known as a comedian at that stage, he appeared in Nathan Axelrod's 1962 film Etz O Palestine, which depicted life in pre-state Palestine from the 1930s through Israel's establishment in 1948.[1] His public work eventually included television presenting, film appearances, commercials, and leadership of the Lool troupe.[4]

Zohar and Arik Einstein formed a successful performing partnership that lasted for years.[7] They appeared together at the Hamam club, whose audiences flocked to its first program, and both participated in the productions Mishlei Erev and Tel Aviv Hak’tana.[7] Einstein later acted mainly in films made by Zohar, his friend and stage partner.[7] Their collaboration thus extended from live performance into the screen work for which both became widely associated.[7]

By the late 1960s, Zohar was also a familiar television presenter: he fronted the Israeli version of What's My Line? and became a popular host of the Miss Israel beauty contest.[1] These appearances ran alongside his developing work as a filmmaker and his participation in musical and sketch comedy.[1] His entertainment career, which began in the mid-1950s, had made him one of Israel's leading public performers before his departure from the industry in 1977.[1]

Zohar's 1963 documentary Battle for the Target, made with cinematographer David Gurfinkel, followed a live-fire Golani Brigade exercise over nine nights.[8] It combined documentary and fictional approaches and presented soldiers in battle through a realistic rather than necessarily heroic image.[8] His later films likewise addressed military experience alongside relationships, machismo, and the contradictions of Israeli social life.[9]

His feature-directing career began with Hole in the Moon, generally dated in the supplied retrospective accounts to 1965.[1][8] In the film, Zohar played a pioneer who arrives in Israel to sell lemonade in the desert.[8] Its modernist, avant-garde approach departed from the national-heroic orientation of much earlier Israeli cinema and helped anticipate the movement known as the “New Sensibility.”[8] The film sold about 40,000 tickets in Israel and was commercially unsuccessful, despite the enduring attention given to its artistic influence.[8][10]

Zohar's work developed during a period in which Israeli cinema increasingly explored individual lives and personal dilemmas alongside collective national subjects.[10] Personal Cinema and Class Cinema were prominent currents in the 1960s and 1970s, while materialism and individualism became more visible themes after the Six-Day War.[10] His films crossed these boundaries: Hole in the Moon represented formally ambitious Personal Cinema, while Every Bastard a King introduced popular romantic themes into the Heroic-Nationalist genre.[10]

Three Days and a Child (1967), adapted from a short story by A. B. Yehoshua, centered on a man asked to care for the young son of a former lover.[11] Its protagonist, Eli, played by Oded Kotler, was a restless and alienated former kibbutz member entrusted with the child for three days in Jerusalem.[3] The drama explored his ambivalence toward the boy, bringing ordinary Israeli life and existential unease into the foreground.[11] Its individualistic, cynical portrait of an Israeli man contrasted with the heroic sabra image presented in He Walked Through the Fields, released the same year.[3]

The film competed at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, where Kotler received the Best Actor Award.[3] Unlike many works associated with Personal Cinema that reached limited audiences, Three Days and a Child also attracted a large audience.[10] Its international recognition and domestic reception accompanied an attempt to bring a fully realized artistic vision to Israeli filmmaking through psychological drama rather than a principally collective national narrative.[10][11]

Zohar returned to the Six-Day War period in Every Bastard a King.[8] One battle sequence drew on the experience of tank soldier Yossi Lafer, who fought while wounded for eight hours against Egyptian tanks at Khan Yunis and received the Medal of Valor.[8] Other films associated with Zohar used slapstick to satirize Israeli society, including its treatment of new immigrants.[9] Across his work, military experience coexisted with explorations of masculinity, personal relationships, and social behavior.[9]

Zohar directed ten films during his relatively short directing career.[3] His later sequence included Metzitzim (1972), Big Eyes (1974), and Save the Lifeguard (1977).[1][3] In Big Eyes, he played basketball coach Benny Furman, a man divided between family obligations and his impulses.[3] Save the Lifeguard, his last film as director before his withdrawal from the industry, was made while his religious transformation was already underway and became one of his more profitable films.[3]

In the late 1960s, Zohar helped found and lead the Tel Aviv Lool group with Arik Einstein and performer Tzvi Shissel.[5] Its wider membership included Shalom Hanoch and Yehonatan Gefen, and its output encompassed television sketches, films, and other entertainment.[4][5] The comic-musical television series Lool, also transliterated Lul, became a classic of Israeli television.[1]

The group's sketch program included a Bible quiz and “La Marmur by Perlach,” in which a father and son destroy their television after a football broadcast is replaced by an opera.[5] Another sketch depicted new immigrants mocking those who arrived after them.[5] These routines placed recognizable cultural situations, popular entertainment, and the behavior of Israelis toward one another within the group's comic repertoire.[5] A catalog record for a 1988 Lool recording credits Zohar as director, screenwriter, actor, and performer, with Zohar, Einstein, and Shissel jointly credited for the sketches and screenplay.[12]

Metzitzim, directed by Zohar in 1972, became a particularly prominent work associated with Lool.[3] Although it initially failed at the box office, it later attained an almost mythic status in Israeli cinema.[3] Its setting and characters captured a freewheeling social world that would become central to both its popularity and later reassessment.[3] The film's reputation consequently developed well beyond the circumstances of its original commercial release.[3]

Behind-the-scenes photographs preserved another view of the production.[13] Gabi Laron, who worked as second assistant cameraman, took photographs on his own initiative during breaks.[13] After being injured on set the previous day, he remained on the beach while a scene was filmed at the Yarkon estuary and used the opportunity to photograph the production.[13] He recalled a friendly set, although Zohar sometimes became annoyed with others, and characterized the film's intended audience by saying, “It was a film of the guys, that spoke in the language of the guys.”[13]

Zohar remained publicly associated with filmmaking during the period immediately preceding his withdrawal.[14] A photograph dated March 31, 1977, shows him with Menahem Golan at a Tel Aviv press conference organized by Itzhak Kol, manager of Herzlia Film, about the company's planned film on the IDF Entebbe operation.[14] That appearance belonged to the same year in which he left the entertainment industry for full-time religious study.[1]

Zohar's move toward Orthodox Judaism became publicly visible before he completely withdrew from entertainment.[2][6] One early sign was his appearance on camera wearing a kippah.[2] During the production of Save the Lifeguard in 1977, he arrived on set wearing a kippah, put on tefillin, and prayed during breaks.[6] The change therefore unfolded while he was still completing work connected with his earlier career.[6][3]

After meeting Rabbi Yitzhak Shlomo Zilberman, Zohar embraced an ultra-Orthodox way of life.[4] In 1977, he left entertainment to study full-time in yeshiva.[4] He, his wife, and their children subsequently left their home in Jaffa for Jerusalem's Kiryat Mattersdorf neighborhood.[6] His withdrawal surprised an Israeli public familiar with the provocative, enfant terrible persona he had cultivated as an entertainer.[1]

Religious study became central to his daily life.[4][15] He grew a long rabbinic beard and undertook full-time study in a kollel for married men in Bnei Brak.[15] He studied in a yeshiva, received rabbinic ordination, and later became publicly active as a Haredi figure.[5] A photograph dated March 15, 1984, identifies an appearance in Petah Tikva as his first official appearance there after becoming a rabbi.[16]

Zohar subsequently mentored people becoming religious and made recorded broadcasts about religious life, including messages opposing the secular lifestyle.[4] He also worked to persuade secular Israelis to incorporate religion into their lives.[2] His educational activity included heading the educational system of Lev L’Achim and encouraging traditional families to enroll their children in Haredi schools.[5] Although he largely withdrew from secular filmmaking and gave few media interviews, he did not permanently abandon public communication.[4][5]

Political campaign work became one application of his filmmaking experience.[5][6] He directed election broadcasts for religious parties, including advertisements for Shas in the 1990s.[5][6] His later public role thus included religious instruction, outreach, educational activism, and selective uses of the screen rather than a continuation of his earlier entertainment career.[4][5]

Zohar's wife, Eliya Shuster, was a former actress who had appeared in Big Eyes, which he directed.[2] They had seven children.[2] Two of his sons married Einstein's two eldest daughters from Einstein's first marriage, making the two longtime friends grandfathers to the same children.[2] Their family relationship continued alongside a friendship that survived the different religious directions their lives had taken.[17]

Zohar remained in contact with secular friends, especially Einstein, after becoming religious.[2] In conversations published after Zohar's death, he recalled Einstein telling him, “There is no secular, no Haredi; we are family.”[17] He said they spoke by telephone almost every week, and after Einstein's death in 2013 he described him as one of the people closest to him.[17][18] Their connection therefore continued long after the stage and film partnership through which they had first become associated.[7][17]

In 2004, Zohar appeared on television with his son Itamar in Metzitzim Inside.[6] The program revisited places linked with his earlier film career and explored the distance between that life and his religious one.[6] It was one of the selective later occasions on which he publicly returned to the subject of his entertainment past after years of limited media exposure.[6]

The 2018 documentary Uri Zohar Returns followed his last directing project, a drama about a dancer's return to religious observance.[17][18] Filmmakers Dani Rosenberg and Yaniv Segalovich first met him through a project for a school for religious girls.[17] Their professional collaboration developed into more than a decade of conversations, shared study, and friendship, providing the basis for an extended record of his later reflections.[17]

Excerpts published in 2022 included Zohar's discussions of his former dependence on audience attention, envy in the entertainment world, religious life, and his continuing struggle with personal impulses.[17] These conversations connected the subjects of his later religious self-examination with questions about performance, ambition, and behavior that had also occupied his filmmaking.[3][17]

Zohar died at his Jerusalem home on June 2, 2022, aged 86; his death was reported as resulting from heart failure.[2][5] He was found after failing to emerge for his usual early-morning routine.[5] A neighbor recalled that he typically rose at 3 a.m. to study and left for prayer around 4:30.[18] He was survived by his wife and seven children.[5] At his funeral, his son Ephraim described his father's relationship with God as loving, invoking his longstanding preparation for prayer and the image of an embrace between lovers.[9]

Zohar's cinematic standing was recognized by his selection for the 1976 Israel Prize for cinema, described as the first such award to a film creator; he declined it.[18] His reputation rested on work ranging from experimental filmmaking and psychological drama to popular satire, television comedy, and films about masculine behavior and personal obligations.[1][3] The continuing status of Lool, Metzitzim, and Three Days and a Child preserved distinct parts of that artistic legacy.[1][3]

His films also form part of the history of Israeli cinema's movement beyond exclusively national-heroic subjects.[8][10] Hole in the Moon brought an avant-garde sensibility to the figure of the pioneer, while Three Days and a Child focused on an alienated individual's emotionally ambiguous encounter with a child.[8][11] Kotler's Cannes award and the latter film's substantial audience demonstrated that psychologically oriented Israeli filmmaking could achieve both international recognition and domestic reach.[10]

Zohar's religious transformation also became a subject of cultural interpretation.[19][20] An essay in SAPIR Journal calls him “Israel's most radiant comic, director, and movie star” and places his 1977 departure for Torah study and teaching within a wider pattern of Israeli entertainers turning toward religion and expressing spiritual journeys in their work.[19] Commentary in Tradition Online places him among an earlier generation of ba’alei teshuva who left cinema, contrasting that choice with later observant filmmakers such as Shuli Rand and Rama Burshtein, who continued making films.[20]

His career has also entered academic study of the Tel Aviv bohemia.[21][22] Elad Wexler's research examines Zohar alongside Dan Ben-Amotz and Amos Kenan as prominent artists of the 1960s and 1970s, considering political messages in their books, films, and plays and their efforts to influence Israel's direction, particularly its relations with Palestinians and the Arab world.[21] Wexler's Hebrew-language doctoral thesis was awarded by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2021 under the supervision of Arieh Saposnik.[22]

Metzitzim has generated sharply different responses: some viewers cherish it as a warm, nostalgic portrait of a favored social circle and freewheeling Israeli culture, while others regard it as celebrating a sexist and misogynistic culture and argue that it should no longer be screened.[13] Reassessments of that film and The Rooster have also emphasized a tension between possible criticism of Israeli masculinity and the presentation of women as objects of male desire.[8] These remain critical interpretations rather than a single settled account of the films' meaning.[8]

Later media coverage has also included negative testimony concerning Zohar's conduct during the Lool period.[8] The available account notes those reports without detailing or adjudicating them, and they should be distinguished from the broader debate over the representation of women in his films.[8]