A Shepherdess in the Holy Land
A common language: the Land of Israel
Daughter of the desert, Sephardic rabbi, and Pearl of Safed have been jointly hunched over together for close to one hundred years in impressive collection of postcards, photographed in Land of Israel in first decade of last century
Shlomo Narinsky (1885-1960), born in Russia, learned sketching and photography in Europe and immigrated to Israel in 1905. He settled in Jerusalem, a member of a group of socialist workers in which David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi were also members.
He opened a photography store called “Unity Photography.” In these years, Narinsky also traveled the country and took pictures. A preliminary gathering of his collection of photographs is brought before you here.
With the outbreak of World War I, Shlomo and his wife Sonya, were banished to Egypt. There they continued to deal with sketching and photography. Sonya was the only female photographer in Egypt, and was privileged to memorialize numerous women, whom local photographers could not photograph.
At the end of the war, the couple returned to Israel, and later moved to Paris. During the Second World War, Narinsky was put in a concentration camp, upon which time his wife, Sonya, called upon his friends in Israel, Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi who successfully worked with the British to release a German spy (one of the Templars in Israel) in exchange for Narinsky’s freedom. The couple returned finally to Israel, settled in Haifa where they dealt with photography, sketching, and teaching.
The series of portraits that Shlomo photographed in his first years in the country were sold to Jamal Brothers Printing in Jerusalem, who published them in 1920 as postcards. Some of them are in three languages: English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Intentional or not, there are differences between the descriptions of the postcards in each language as well as many misspellings which we have left as they are. If you please, it is a sort of war of the languages a la the early 20th century.
