Hazel Greenwald (1895-1977) was a photographer, creator, film producer, and Zionist activist. US-born Greenwald never trained professionally as a photographer. Instead, she honed her craft through a lifetime of unwavering, dedicated work. As a Haddasah* board member (*the Women’s Zionist Organisation of America) and co-founder of its national documentation department, Greenwald devoted her life to audio-visually chronicling a bourgeoning modern Hebrew society and the gestating state that would follow.
Between 1943-1963, Greenwald shot and produced a range of comms and PR films in which she had documented the organisation’s body-of-work, as part of an ongoing fundraising drive. The films she made highlighted in particular the youth migration scheme (aka ‘Aliyat Hanoar’) that saved thousands of Jewish children from Nazi hands; life in the migrant transit camps; the growing Jewish communities across then-Palestine and later, Israel, and the boom in agricultural and land work. Several films featured the stories of boys and girls who had survived the Holocaust and went on to rebuild their lives in youth villages. Some, like Greenwald’s 1945 film, The Forgotten Children, were made to elicit donations whereas others, like 1962’s And Still They Come, told the story of the ‘Aliyat Hanoar’ Jewish youths who managed to rehabilitate and rebuild their lives in Israel, after all the horrors they had endured.
The Hazel Greenwald Collection features a variety of comms and PR films, including the 1949 film, Am Shalom – People of Peace, that was meant to boost Hadassah’s fundraising efforts, and Helmar Lerski’s 1947 US adaptation of the film Tomorrow is a Wonderful Day. Also included in the collection is unofficial footage shot on Greenwald’s camera. The footage has a distinctly home video-esque quality to it, in that it captures not only Hadassah’s work at the time, but also the overall zeitgeist – a living testimony of the Jewish migrants’ pioneering spirit and the nascent state’s fight for survival in its earliest days.
This is a collection of immense historical significance which will, no doubt, serve as an invaluable source of information for scholars, filmmakers, students, museums, various organisations, etc. The collection is the property of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
For more information, please visit: https://jfa.huji.ac.il
