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The photographs shown in this exhibition are taken from the collection of photographs by Zoltan Kluger in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. They describe the first Jewish settlers in Tarshiha, where approximately one hundred Romanian immigrant families who upon arrival in Israel were sent to settle in abandoned Arab homes in the village.
Tarshiha, a village in the Western Galilee was first mentioned in documents from the Crusader period in the 12th and 13th centuries. During the Ottoman period and then the British Mandate, its importance grew as a central settlement located between Safed and Acre. According to the United Nation Partition Plan of 1947, the village was meant to be part of the future Arab state. However, during the War of Independence there were fierce battles, and on October 30, 1948, the village was conquered by the Oded Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces. Many of the residents of the village, some 5,700 people belonging to 84 families, fled in the direction of Beki'in and from there to southern Lebanon and Syria. Christians who lived in the village, about 300 people, and sick people who could not move remained in the village. In September 1949 there were an estimated 1,000 Arab residents in the village and about 100 Jewish families from Romania.
Initially, the settlement was named "Ma'ona" and defined as a moshav (a type of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms), but due to the economic difficulties experienced by the Jewish settlers, it was decided to divide them in two: an urban and an agricultural settlement. Fifty families who wanted to work in agriculture left Tarshiha and established the Ma'ona Moshav, while the remaining families in Tarshiha were called "the urban Ma'ona."
Kluger, who documented the Romanian Jewish families in Tarshiha, was one of the most important photographers in pre-state Israel. His photographs document the life of the "state in the making" and its inhabitants. He wandered around the country and photographed Jewish settlers from every angle. In each settlement that he photographed, he worked in collaboration with the local people.
In his works Kluger succeeded in creating symbols of Zionism and state in a way that connected salvation of man with salvation of the land: such as "settlement", "construction", "protection", "work", "pioneer", and "refugee". Sometimes he managed to turn the "photographic moment" or the "subject of the photograph" into an iconic image, and present a heroic, moral and human reality. The text of the photo captions were also meant to convey the message. For example, the main text of the photographs accompanying the exhibition reads: "Romanian Immigrants establish a workers' moshav in the abandoned Arab village of "Tarshiha."
Kluger was born in Kechkemet, Hungary in 1896. At the end of the 1920's he emigrated to Berlin and worked there as a press photographer. In April 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Kluger travelled to Palestine as a tourist and decided to settle. That same year, Nachman Shifrin, a journalist and editor of European Jewish press, whom Kluger knew from Berlin, also immigrated to Palestine. In Tel Aviv, Shifrin established the "The Orient Press Photo Company" which supplied most of the photographs by to the Zionist organizations. In 1934, Kluger joined Shifrin as a partner and chief photographer in the Company. Kluger became one of the main photographers of Zionist institutions in the two decades preceding the establishment of the State of Israel. He worked for the JNF and Keren Hayesod photography departments, which sent him to photograph economic enterprises and new Jewish settlements. In 1958 Kluger emigrated to the United States and opened a small photography shop in New York. He died in New York in 1971.
Kluger left behind an archive of more than 50,000 negatives, which are now divided among the largest public archives in the country, such as the Keren Hayesod collection in the Central Zionist Archives, the Jewish National Fund, the GPO, the Israel State Archives and the IDF Archives.
