According to the Hebrew calendar, Tu Bishvat 2016 began this year on the night of Sunday, January 24. In honor of the occasion, KKL-JNF hosted a festive screening of the 1946 film “My Father’s House” at the Jerusalem Cinematheque.
In 1946, KKL-JNF financed and supported the production of “My Father’s House", a feature film on Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel. The movie tells the story of a young boy who comes to Israel after the war. He arrives on an illegal Maapilim ship - during the time when the British severely restricted Jewish immigration to Israel - and searches for his parents throughout the country, wandering through the Jordan Valley, Haifa, Caesarea, Tel Aviv, the Dead Sea, Jerusalem and more. He eventually realizes that the Land of Israel is his only home. The film ends with a scene that shows the founding of Kibbutz Nirim.
The renowned Israeli film director and archivist Yaakov Gross edited and restored the movie into a new digital version, which is 84 minutes long, in English with Hebrew subtitles.
At the festive screening of the film at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, Gross noted that this year, “we are celebrating Tu Bishvat in the same week that International Holocaust Memorial Day is being observed. KKL-JNF’s original reason for funding the production of this film was in order to screen it abroad and to raise money for absorbing Holocaust survivors in Israel.
“‘My Father’s House’ is one of four movies that were produced in Israel after World War II. They are not very well known, and part of our motivation for re-releasing them is to make the public aware of their existence and to see how Israel looked at the time. Meyer Levin, who wrote the script, wanted to make this movie for many years, but it was only when KKL-JNF decided to finance him that he was able to realize his dream.”
KKL-JNF Vice Chairman Hernan Felman also spoke at the event. “I made aliya to Israel in 1982 and was only recently appointed to be KKL-JNF vice chairman. For me, volunteering in KKL-JNF enables me to fulfill the vision that led me to come to Israel – to support the Jewish people and the Jewish state through KKL-JNF, the most active and practical of the Zionist organizations. It seems that every day I discover a new aspect of KKL-JNF’s diverse activities, and today I found out that the organization was involved in filmmaking. I look forward to seeing the movie and am grateful for the opportunity to learn something new.”
One of the honored guests at the screening was Israela Epstein (Lustigman), an actress in the movie who played the role of a girl in a kibbutz that the young boy meets. “For me, taking part in the movie provided me with my first glimpse of what happened during the Holocaust, a subject not widely discussed in Israel at the time. Meyer Levin had been in Europe and he saw the concentration camps. I ended up in the movie because my father was a KKL-JNF employee who was connected to the filmmaking department. When Meyer Levine came to Israel, my father invited him for dinner, where he saw me and asked me to take part in the movie, probably because I spoke English. It was very special for me, because I got to travel all over Israel and see the country, something we didn’t usually have time for then.”
The movie is also being screened at the Kibbutz Alumim Visitors Center, the Haifa Cinematheque, the Tel Aviv Cimematheque, and at Bet Gavriel on the shores of Lake Kinneret.