By Mary Fan
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 23, 1998

A Return Home

Zion Ozeri's camera loves people, and it loves stories. The photo essay "The People of Israel at 50" has settled on a story of desire and faith and the end of a 2000-year journey home.

Because home, desire and faith is what Israel is all about.

It's the object of the Old Testament yearning of people cast out into a desert, people without a nation for almost 2,000 years. People forced to ride the waves of settled-people's tolerance. People tossed for centuries on the cyclic tide of welcome and eviction, always casting for a place to stay - and dreaming about home.

The need for home is hard to understand these days as we weave dreams about a universal identity and a world without boundaries and walls, but history, that nagging voice of what has been and what may be again, shows the fearful tenacity of life without a home.

Holocaust survivor Gabrielle Schneider speaks to that.

She remembers her family's fall after Czechoslovakia sold their Jews to the Germans.

"We were sitting at the Passover table and the soldiers ran to our house and they took him to a Jewish temple and tortured him," Schneider says in a low voice.

It's a hard thing to see - the anger darkening the wide, clear eyes of this gentle woman. Nobody wants to remember the ugliness of betrayal.

It shows you were never home, for home is not a place that sells you out. Home is a place you go to when that happens.

This is why when the call for a country reached its fever pitch after the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews from nations across the world volunteered for the fight. The climax of the story.

And the images at the Hillel Foundation tell it.

There are photos of the warriors in the Six Day War, one of the six struggles since Israel's birth almost 50 years ago.

An Israeli officer before a stone bunker with the top razed off.

Another officer before the ancient walls of Jerusalem, which he fought to regain.

And the fruit of battle, photos of children studying Hebrew for the first time, snapshots of immigrants from the Ukraine, Soviet Union and Russia at work in the promised land of their faith.

But the focus is on people. They are framed before the rolling plains of Galilee, the ancient battle-scarred walls of Jerusalem.

And against those ancient places you feel the strength of these people - clinging to a spot of earth that has been washed in blood and desire, in which they have been slaves and conquerors.

To Schneider, Israel is born in the blood and pain of those that died around her.

"I feel that God brought the concentration camps on us - that God killed 6 million so we should get back Israel," she says, and her conviction is evident through the soft fire starting in the childlike clarity of her eyes.

And Israel's obligation to those 6 million is to endure.

The serene black and white portraits speak of this conviction and extend a promise -Israel at 50 is forever more a nation that will hold through the modern-day terrors of fitful wars and land grabs. The blood of Israel is faith - that ancient fire that has lighted the dark passage of a people on their 2,000-year journey home.