—Shlomo Arad, curator and Newsweek photographer emeritus
Paul Goldman’s career focused mainly on a newborn and its growing pains. He photographed scenes in the life of his adopted homeland as it became Israel and struggled to survive. Vivid images shot with a chunky Speed Graphic news camera during the 1940s and 1950s document intimately personal moments at a time of sweeping, historic change.
The man behind the lens, a Hungarian-born photojournalist, fled from Budapest in 1940 with his wife Dina to escape the danger they and other Jews confronted from spreading Nazism. Arriving in Palestine during its tumultuous final years under British control, which had begun in 1918, Goldman snapped his shutter as a freelance photographer for local newspapers and international news services.
More than 100 of his newly restored images, many never published, were unveiled in September 2004 at the Collection’s debut exhibit, held at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. The exhibit, entitled The Forgotten Photographs: The Work of Paul Goldman from 1943 – 1961, from the COLLECTION OF SPENCER M. PARTRICH, comes in February 2005 to the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, Mich., arranged by Partrich, a Farmington Hills, Michigan-based real estate developer.
Goldman’s simply composed, brightly lit shots represent more than a bystander’s snapshots at a turning point for the Middle East. Thanks to privileged access – first as a British Army member, later as a journalist befriended by Israeli leaders – he gained a front-row perspective at a pivotal time.
The resulting Collection of 40,000 negatives are a panorama of events, families, leaders, struggles and hopes. Goldman’s best-known image is part of an eye-catching series showing Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion doing a headstand at Sharon Hotel Beach in Herzliyah in September 1957.
“Paul Goldman seemed to have been almost everywhere and at the right moment,” said curator Shlomo Arad, a renowned former Newsweek photographer. “He stood with his camera by the cradle of the state in the making. . . . His subjects were refugees and diplomats, leaders and ordinary men and women,” Arad added.
Dramatic and distressing
The 4x5 negatives, which Partrich purchased from Goldman’s daughter in late 2001 so that they could be restored and exhibited, span 18 years and an array of subjects. Some scenes are ordinary, others extraordinary; some are poignant, others disturbing.
Images include peaceful 1945-46 streetscapes and beach scenes in Tel Aviv, including a roasted corn vendor at Mugrabi Plaza and a beggar with a performing monkey.
On other days in 1945, the same camera pointed at Holocaust survivors from Buchenwald, Auschwitz and other Nazi camps as they landed at the Port of Haifa and reached resettlement camps in Palestine.
In July 1946, Goldman raced in his Jeep to the site of an historic attack by Israeli underground fighters against British Army offices at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. He arrived in time to photograph casualties being evacuated from the explosion site, where 91 people died and hundreds were wounded.
Historic rarities are part of the treasures restored at a Jerusalem lab. A 1949 photo essay shows the secretive journey of Yemenite Jews from Aden to camps in Israel. Families seen in images of the Goldman exhibition are among 47,000 refugees relocated in an Operation Magic Carpet airlift by 380 American and British planes.
Destined for prominence
Familiar faces are part of the Collection, including Chaim Weizmann, the nation’s first president, and emerging figures destined to gain international fame -- Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin and a young lieutenant colonel commanding a paratroopers' brigade in March 1957. That uniformed officer is Ariel Sharon, now Israel’s prime minister.
Though the subject matter suggests Goldman earned prominence himself, he worked in anonymity at a time before photojournalism was respected as a creative form. News pictures generally appeared uncredited or with a tiny name line. “His images made their way into the national pantheon in almost total anonymity,” Arad writes. In the museum catalog, Arad calls the collection “a treasure for historians and sociologists, students and researchers.”
