Uri Zohar

Rabbi Uri Zohar (אורי זוהר ; 4 November 1935 – 2 June 2022) was an Israeli film director, actor and comedian who left the entertainment world to become an orthodox rabbi.

Biography
Uri Zohar was born in Tel Aviv. His parents were Polish Jewish immigrants. In 1952, he graduated high school and did his military service in an army entertainment troupe. His first marriage, to singer Ilana Rovina, ended in divorce.

In 1960, he studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was sentenced to three months of community service on charges of marijuana possession. In the late 1970s, under the influence of Yitzhak Shlomo Zilberman, Zohar turned to religion, becoming a Haredi Orthodox Jew and a rabbi.

He was a close friend of Arik Einstein, with whom he made some of his most noted films. Einstein's two daughters married Zohar's sons.

Zohar was one of the founding members of Ma'ale Amos. Later, he resided in Jerusalem.

He died at the age of 86 on 2 June 2022. He was survived by his second wife Eliya Shuster, a former actress who had participated in a film he directed, their seven children and numerous grandchildren.

Entertainment and film career
After his discharge from the army, Zohar became one of the founding members of the theatre and entertainment troupe Batzal Yarok, which was popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the 1960s, Zohar directed and starred in Israeli films, among them Hole in the Moon, Three Days and a Child, Every Bastard a King, Big Eyes and Metzitzim. He directed 11 full-length films as well as a number of short movies and episodes of the television series "Lool" (Chicken Coop). When Israel Television went on air, he became a program host and appeared in commercials.

In 1977, he began wearing a kippa on the television game show he was hosting. He eventually withdrew entirely from Israel's popular culture scene to become a Haredi Jew and began to study in yeshiva. He became a rabbi in Jerusalem and immersed himself in Biblical scholarship. He became active in the movement to attract secular Jews to religious orthodoxy, and used his entertainment skills to promote this objective. In the 1992 Israeli elections, Zohar directed the television broadcasts for the Shas party. He later directed a film about a successful dancer who embraces orthodox Judaism, mirroring his own story. The film was a success with Ultra-Orthodox audiences. Zohar had enlisted the help filmmakers Dani Rosenberg and Yaniv Segalovich to make it, and Rosenberg and Segalovich in turn made a documentary about him.

When asked in an interview about how he regarded his former career in entertainment, Zohar said that "I respect it, the way a mature adult remembers his childhood. But there's no escaping the fact that I was a child."

Awards and recognition
In 1976 he was awarded the Israel Prize for cinema, which he declined. In 2012, Cinémathèque Française in Paris held a retrospective of Zohar's work. The event included lectures and screenings of all his major films. Zohar was described as one of Israel's most interesting film directors due to his exploration of manhood and machismo, male-female relationships and the impact of the military.

Personal life
In the early 1960s, Zohar was married to the singer Ilana Rovina for about two years. Later he married Alia Shuster, an actress who starred in the movie "Big Eyes" that he directed.

Zohar and Alia, who lived in Jaffa after getting married and later became religiously observant and moved to Jerusalem, had seven children. His two oldest sons, Ephraim Fishel and Shalom, married the daughters of Alona and Arik Einstein, Shiri and Yasmin, who also became religiously observant. The wedding of Ephraim Fishel and Shiri was documented in Renan Shor's 1985 short film "A Wedding in Jerusalem." Another son, Itamar, who became secular, initiated the 2004 three-part series "Looking Inside" - a series in which Itamar examines the two worlds his father lived in, and they debate matters of faith, values and reconciliation between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews. After several years Itamar returned to religious observance. The series was filmed in their Jerusalem home, as well as locations where Zohar lived and worked in Tel Aviv. Another son, Betzalel, managed the Migdal Or institutions of Rabbi Yitzhak David Grossman. The youngest son, David, is a Jerusalem city council member representing the United Torah Judaism party. Zohar's only daughter, Ahinoam, is the subject of the song "Ahinoam Doesn't Know," which appeared on Erik Einstein's album "Pozy."

Rabbi Uri Zohar passed away on June 2, 2022 at the age of 86, after suffering a heart attack at his home in Jerusalem's Romema neighborhood. The funeral procession left from the home he lived in, accompanied by many mourners. He was buried in Har HaMenuchot cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

Published works

 * My Friends, We Were Robbed
 * Waking Up Jewish

Filmography

 * The True Story of Palestine (1962)
 * Hole in the Moon (1964)
 * Moishe Ventalator (1966)
 * Three Days and a Child (1967)
 * Every Bastard a King (1968)
 * Hitromamut (1970)
 * The Hero (1971)
 * Metzitzim (1973)
 * Ha-Tarnegol (1973)
 * Big Eyes (1974 film) (1974)
 * Hatzilu Et HaMatzil (1977)