The photographer Liselotte Grschebina was born in Karlsruhe, Germany. She and her husband settled in Tel Aviv in 1934. From the 1930s to the 1950s, she took photographs for WIZO, the Palestine Railways, the dairy cooperative Tnuva, kibbutzim, and various businesses. Her work was innovative and startling, portraying subjects through surprising vantage points, strong diagonals, and the play of light and shadow, techniques she had learned in Weimar Germany during the early-twentieth-century revolution in photographic art.
This photograph of a discus thrower refers to the Zionist idea of “muscular Judaism,” in which the “new” Jew would celebrate and cultivate the body, sports, and physical fitness. When Grschebina…
[The matter of] the breakthrough: And this is the matter of the breakthrough. While [the hewers were swinging the] axe, each towards his companion, and while there were still three cubits to he[w…
In 1391, Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet (known as Rivash), a respected rabbinic scholar and author of numerous responsa, suffered from the violent riots and mass conversions in Spain but then fled to…