Moody Bar-On is dead. Sorry, passed away, it’s more honorable to say. Modi Bar-On passed away. That’s a fact. And in a few weeks it will be an ancient, even forgotten, prehistoric fact. This is the truth, the lifespan of public memory is very short, it is even outrageous when one gets to know it up close. No one will remember Modi Bar-On in a month.
I am not saying this, God forbid, out of disrespect for the man’s actions, I am saying this out of private pain. When my father passed away a little over eight years ago, it became the opening news item in the eight-evening edition, and his face was smeared on the covers of all the newspapers. And all the important people in the land mourned. You could not miss it.
A month ago was the anniversary of his death and I went to visit him in Nahalal Cemetery as I do every year. Coincidentally, there was a group of children from one of the schools in the country. They arrived as part of a guided educational tour, in which groups of children of middle and high school age come to prostrate themselves on the graves of the righteous of beautiful Israel in the Nahalali cemetery. We begin by prostrating ourselves on the grave of my late grandfather Moshe Dayan and move on to the deceased, next to him, the late Ilan Ramon, and from there continue to Hannah Meisel Shochat and other personalities who are considered a link in the backbone of Israeliness. At the end of the tour they also came to my father’s plot, where I was standing.
The guide told them, “This is Asi Dayan’s grave.” One of the children asked, “Who is this?”, And she gave a brief overview of his work and said at the end that he was one of the greatest Israeli filmmakers of all time. None of the children knew what she was talking about. One said he heard about “Givat Halfon”, another asked why, if he is the son of Moshe Dayan, he is buried in a row far from him, a third asked where the fountain is, because he is thirsty. It was sad.
Eight Ophir Awards, three Lifetime Achievement Awards, a huge film catalog, the all-time popular comedy, the drama that defined the new Israeli cinema, and 30 middle school children in Hod Hasharon stare into space and do not understand why they are talked about, Asi Dayan, and more in this heat .
Well, something strange happened. As I write these lines, the phone rings, on the production line of one of the morning shows, “Uri Zohar passed away, did you know him personally?” Well, I did not know him personally, but there can be no Maori Zohar within you, since he is one of Israel’s greatest designers, both in his creative period as a director and actor and in his Torah period as a man whose return in his answer had a clear statement: I visited the summit of secularism, I was there, I ruled over the realm of culture and brass, and guess what? Not only was I not happy, I suffered and felt that nothing I did meant anything.
No matter how many eyes see him and how much praise he gets in the paper. Everything is nonsense, and the fact that a lot of people love you does not mean that you will love yourself too. But maybe instead of looking for people who love you, you will focus on loving someone else, the name, and it will probably soothe your wounded soul much more than another scene, another take, another yacht on Avigdor’s lawn, another tit on a peeking beach. The desire to devour everything and experience everything in Tel Aviv in the face of asceticism and modesty in a one-and-a-half-room apartment in Jerusalem. This is the story of Uri Zohar. But unfortunately he will not be remembered either.
Here I heard on the radio one of the reporters on ultra-Orthodox affairs from one of the rooftop television channels that “I wonder where Uri Zohar will get a first street – in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem?” The reflection here is, of course, which Uri Zohar will receive more commemoration – Uri the director (of Tel Aviv) or Uri Harav (of Jerusalem).
But the thing the roofer did not understand (and probably does not know) is that it has nothing to do with broad philosophical questions, it has to do with small questions and above all: does anyone intend to do the work required for commemoration in the name of a street? And what is probably even more unclear to him from the roof on the radio is how much bureaucratic work and how many barriers there are to the commemoration of a cultural figure in the name of a street.
Want to know how to get a street name in the country? First of all, you have to wait a year before you can access the commemoration activity, this is the law in most municipalities in the country. Then you have to look for and find in each municipality the head of the commemoration and names committee (not such a simple thing), contact him and then try to convince him to offer the possibility of raising the name of your loved one to the next committee, which will convene in who knows how long.
The point of these committees is that they are replete with endless municipal politics and timeless waiting lists. For example, in the Tel Aviv municipality, when I asked to commemorate my father’s name, they actually laughed at me and told me that the names committee was closed for the next 20 years and that this was the committee with the most politics. “But Asi Dayan is an important figure in Israeli culture,” I told the same source in the municipality I spoke to, noting that my father is the all-time winner of the Ophir Awards and that he is behind the most formative films of Israeli cinema.
“Importance in culture has zero impact,” the source laughed. Do you want to know why it matters? For those who donate money to the municipality, for those who have a family member in office with power in the municipality. These are the things that change. These are the things that determine. Cultural importance? You made me laugh”.
Now the question is whether there is a family member in the Zohar family who intends to mobilize entirely for this issue and lose work hours and family time in order to march the Dolorosa being of commemoration. On the one hand the benefits of the Zohar family is that they are many. Zohar has seven children. Their downside in this area is that they are anxious and their work is for heaven’s sake before God and it does not seem to me that they are going to worship the god of petty politics and nag on the phone to one naming committee or another and sit on the infinity of forms the commemoration process requires. In short, he will not be remembered either.
You might have expected that the State of Israel would have some sort of mechanism that would deal with the preservation of the cultural heritage of Palestine, but no. In the end – and I say this from experience – if you want something to be remembered here in the country, you have to go to war. And unfortunately the reality is that everyone has too many daily wars to fight.