The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive has published the first of three projected volumes listing the contents of Israeli newsreels. The publication, in English and well illustrated, deals with newsreels made between 1932 and 1956. Television came to Israel only in 1968, and until then the cinema newsreels were the only source of visual news. Their production continued till 1971. As in other countries, they were shown before the main feature as part of the cinema program. Video viewing copies of all material listed in the book are available at the Spielberg Archive.
The work of three pioneer filmmakers is represented in the catalogue: Yaakov Ben Dov, Baruch Agadati and Natan Axelrod. Editors Wendy Luterman and Hillel Tryster have presented the material in chronological order wherever possible and identified hundred of the personalities seen in the footage. A glossary section gives brief biographical data on over two hundred of the most prominent of these.
Much of what is seen in these films cannot be categorized as "hard" news; a large proportion of the items deal with the cultural and social life of the period. Reasons for inclusion were frequently quite mundane: the ability of the newsreel crew to arrive at an event, the limitations of the equipment available and the brief length of the newsreel. There were even occasions when there was simply no raw film stock to be had - there is a long break in the production of the Carmel Newsreel in the early forties because of the problems of supply from Europe during world war II.
It is an ironic fact that some of the most momentous events of the time are not represented in the collection. The declaration of the State of Israel, for instance, though filmed by Natan Axelrod, is not present in this listing because Axelrod sold the footage abroad.
All the information in the catalogue has been entered into the general computerized catalogue of the Spielberg Archive, which is part of the larger database (ALEPH) of the Hebrew University and the Jewish National and Univesrsity Library.
A novel use of modern computer technology lies in the fact that a diskette containing the complete text of the catalogue is included in the book's jacket in place of a conventional index. By importing the contents of the diskette into any word search or word processing program, the user may search for a character string to locate a desired subject. Abstract subjects have been appended to the diskette version of the text to further facilitate this process.
The catalogue is expected to be of interest to researchers, documentary filmmakers and historians alike. Priced at $25, it is available directly from the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, Box 65, Law Building, the Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel.

Marilyn Koolik