Life cycles

IN MEMORIAM

DR. RICHARD A. FREUND

Dr. Richard A. Freund passed away peacefully on July 14, 2022, at age 67, in Charlottesville, Virginia. A graveside service was held on July 17, 2022, at the Jewish Cemetery of the Virginia Peninsula, in Hampton, Virginia.

He was preceded in death by nephews, Josh and Glenn.

He is survived his wife Eliane; his three children, Eli, Ethan, and Yoni; sisters and brothers-in-law, Andrea and Richard Eisen and Sharon and Jody Rockmaker and brother and sister-in-law, Charles and Renee Freund; brother-in-law and sister-in law, Arthur and Liz Goldgaber; father-in-law and mother-in law, Alberto and Berta Goldgaber; and nieces and nephews, Rebecca, Hannah, Clifford, and Sam.

Born to the late Chester Freund and Beatrice Berkowitz in Long Island, NY, Richard lived in Franklin Square and graduated from Valley Stream North High School in 1972 at 17 years old.

Determined to learn more about Jewish history and culture, he booked a one-way ticket to Israel where he studied, learned Israeli dancing, and practiced what he excelled at-running. He famously tells the story of trying out for the Israeli Olympic Track Team in 1972 but missing it by a split second.

He met the love of his life, Eliane, a decade later, in Israel, on a post-doctoral grant, and they got married in 1983. For nearly 40 years, Richard worked as a professor in Jewish history and archaeology, starting at Oberlin College and traveling to the University of Denver, the University of California-San Diego, the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the University of Hartford, and finally ended his career at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. Through his time in academia, he mentored thousands of students and collaborated with countless other faculty members from across the country in pursuit of answers to some of our history’s greatest questions.

For some, teaching and writing would have been enough, but Richard lived the equivalent of three lives-pursuing the field of biblical archaeology and trying to solve humanity’s greatest mysteries. He directed over a dozen archaeological projects at Bethsaida, Mary’s Well in Nazareth, and climbed the caves of Qumran in search of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all located in the State of Israel. Later in life, he traveled to Spain to discover the Lost City of Atlantis, which got him featured in a documentary produced by James Cameron. After that, he made key discoveries in the Ponar Burial Pits and the Great Synagogue of Vilna, Lithuania. In total, his work was featured in over 20 documentaries from National Geographic, Discovery, History Channel, and many others. His work was also chronicled in the New York Times, Time Magazine, BBC, MSNBC, and hundreds more news outlets. In one of the peak moments of his life, he presented St. Peter’s key, found at Bethsaida, to Pope John Paul II in 2000.

Memorials may be made to Rodef Sholom Temple in Newport News, the Betram and Gladys Aaron Professorship of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University, or the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

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Image of Victory, Netflix’s new Israeli war drama, revisits the capture of a kibbutz in 1948

ANDREW LAPIN

JTA The story of Israel’s 1948 war for independence is told through the eyes of one kibbutz in Image of Victory, a new Netflix film that’s being billed as the most expensive Israeli movie ever. Inspired by the real-life battle for control of Kibbutz Nitzanim, during which Egyptian forces overpowered the Israeli military, briefly captured the territory and took more than 100 prisoners of war, director Avi Nesher’s old-fashioned wartime melodrama is more interested in the human beings caught up in the fighting than it is in the fighting itself. It’s fitting, then, that one of the movie’s protagonists is a professed admirer of Frank Capra, Old Hollywood’s famed humanist. On one side, the film follows the Jewish kibbutz residents who have settled in Mandatory Palestine from all over the world and the small, strapped Israel Defense Forces battalion assigned to protect them. (We meet, among others, two Spanish-speaking cousins from South America, who are based on real-life figures.) On the other side, the film follows Hassanin (Amir Khoury), an Egyptian journalist assigned by the king to make a documentary film about the army unit tasked with capturing Nitzanim. Hassanin, who narrates the film in flashback, locks eyes with the enemy only once, at their moment of surrender. But the image he captures on camera in that moment resonates with him for decades: young kibbutznik Mira (Joy Reiger) smiling as she futilely draws a pistol against the advancing Egyptian forces. The film is inspired by the real-life figure of Mira Ben-Ari, a Nitzanim radio operator who was killed during the battle after shooting an Egyptian officer; her surprising decision to stay and fight alongside the Israeli men, against overwhelming odds, made her a martyr figure in Israel. Scripted by Nesher, Liraz Brosh and Ehud Bleiberg (whose father was a dairy farmer in Nitzanim), much of the film details everyday life in the kibbutz. Characters tend to their dairy cows, eat communal meals, play music and train for war. Far from idealized postcards, these domestic sequences depict often harsh gender dynamics: The male soldiers regularly harass and belittle the women, who must resort to creative means (including, occasionally, sexual humiliation) to assert their own authority. The lush production design includes detailed period recreations of the kibbutz and the surrounding battlegrounds. Throughout, both the Israeli and Egyptian characters debate the war and the politics of the era — discussions that haven’t changed much in 75 years. One of the Nitzanim residents notes they had to push out Palestinians in order to build their kibbutz, and wonders if things might be easier if they simply returned the territory. She is swiftly rebuffed by an Israeli general, who insists that the minute they give up an inch, they’ll be back on the road to another Holocaust. And yet the fighting unsettles everyone: the first death in the film, at the hands of the Israeli soldiers, turns out to be that of an Arab child. Of course, framing is everything, as Hassanin knows well. When the character attempts to capture small, intimate moments that will humanize his Arab fighters on film, he finds his efforts rebuffed by the king and the area commander, who only want heroic images of the Egyptian conquest and Israeli defeat. This look at how stories are told is a meta-commentary on Image of Victory itself, which is also making choices about how to frame history by choosing to dramatize one of the 1948 war’s few instances of Israeli surrender, in which the IDF come across as uncharacteristically helpless and their opponents as

well-organized and heavily armored. Israeli filmmakers have long been engaged in an often contentious dialogue with the public about how to depict their own country’s past and present; Tantura, a documentary from earlier this year, told a much harsher account of the founding of a different kibbutz in 1948.

Image of Victory isn’t looking to provoke its Israeli audience in quite the same way. What Nesher wants is to present a human-centric approach to war storytelling. The movie is dedicated to the victims of the battle for Nitzanim, on both sides.

Image of Victory debuted July 15 on Netflix.

Actors playing Israeli soldiers guarding Kibbutz Nitzanim in the Israeli war

film Image of Victory. Credit: Netflix

FOOD ROSH HASHANAH 2022