"Life of the Jews of Palestine", Noah Sokolovsky (1913)

História viva neste documentário seminal, feito por um activista sionista numa bem aventurança promotora da Terra Prometida. O filme mostra a actividade dos judeus europeus acabados de chegar a Israel e na sua interacção com os seus correlegionários do Médio Oriente.

"Like finding documentation of Moses" was how one Israeli film historian described the rediscovery, in 1997, of The Life of the Jews in Palestine, a 1913 film shot by a Russian crew in the Holy Land and presumed lost for 80 years. Few among the 33 selections in the New York Jewish Film Festival hold out the promise of such divine revelations. But rare archival films and documentaries about music are among the highlights.

A smash hit throughout the Pale of Settlement, The Life of the Jews in Palestine offered shtetl dwellers a vision of terrestrial paradise. Noah Sokolovky's 79-minute silent is a cinematic experience of aliyah, or homecoming: opening on board a ship in Odessa, where passengers bid adieu to the diaspora, and gliding past the ancient Oriental mysteries of Constantinople, before surveying the broad, perpendicular avenues of brand-new Tel Aviv, whose allure is distinctly modern. All across this land of plenty, where Jews appear virtually the sole inhabitants, girls and boys (liberated from kitchen and yeshiva) learn agricultural techniques and compete at gymnastics. Sokolovky's crew captured the farms of the Galilee, but not the malarial swamps that surrounded them; the piety of Hasidim at Hebron, but not their tensions with Arab neighbors. Only the stiff backs and rigid physiognomies of middle-aged pioneers celebrating 30 years of Zionist enterprise suggest the price that dream exacted from its earliest participants.

- in Storied Lives and Strange Bedfellows - Tenth Annual New York Jewish Film Festival