The exhibition, entitled Birth of a Nation, is the brainchild of David Rubinger, also a photographer, who discovered some 40,000 carefully catalogued negatives of Goldman in his daughter's attic. Several of Rubinger's photographs are displayed alongside Goldman's in the show.
Both men shared similar histories. Both escaped to Palestine and joined the British Army, which ruled the territory at the time. Both were simultaneously soldiers and photographers.
Among the photographs in the exhibition is one of the chain-smoking Israeli prime minister Golda Meir adhering to the smoking ban in the Knesset with one foot inside the chamber and the other outside.
Meir is not the only famous Israeli politician captured in the photographs. The father of the country David Ben-Gurion is shown doing a handstand on the beach of Herzliya, and in another photograph he is seen shoeless in a chair explaining something to his wife, who is sweeping the floor.
Historical events revisited in the photographs include the war of independence and show the arrival of illegal Jewish immigrants - people freed from the concentration camps only to stand behind barbed wires in an internment camp once again. Others show the re-burial of Theodor Herzl - the father of Zionism - in Jerusalem in 1948; the war of 1967; Chaim Weizmann taking his presidential oath; the Eichmann trial; and the aliyah. An especially haunting image shows a paper bearing the words of a peace anthem, stained with blood, taken from the pocket of Yitzak Rabin after his assassination.
Both Goldman and Rubinger present the Palestinian conflict objectively, as a fratricidal struggle. The photograph of a Yemeni Jewish couple as they mourn over their soldier son is placed next to the image of mourning Palestinian women.
By Tamás Halász
