TEL AVIV.- Tel Aviv Museum of Art is marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War with an exhibition of works by the filmmaker and artist Amos Gitai, who served as a young reservist in a helicopter rescue unit on the Syrian front. On the sixth day of the war, his helicopter was hit by a Syrian missile, killing the co-pilot. Miraculously, the rest of the unit survived.

The war changed Gitai’s path and led him to filmmaking. Over the decades, He became an internationally acclaimed creator with a copious filmography that includes dozens of documentaries, features, and experimental films. The events of the Yom Kippur War return in his cinematic work in telling personal and political moments. In 2000, more than two decades after the war, they were adapted into the feature film Kippur, one of the most striking war films of the 21st century, which gained attention in Israel and the world and became a milestone in the representation of the war in Israeli cinema.

The exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum of Art presents materials from the past: shorts he filmed during the war with his Super-8 camera, expressive drawings he created as real-time witness accounts of sorts that are shown here for the very first time, segments from the documentary Kippur: War Memories (1994) broadcast on the Israeli Channel 1, and the opening shot of the feature film Kippur. These lead up to the new video installation Kippur, War Requiem, in which Gitai edited several of the most memorable scenes of the film Kippur. Images of the traces of tank chains on the scarred earth of the Golan Heights, soldiers struggling to carry a wounded soldier on a stretcher through thick mud, and the missile hitting the helicopter envelope the viewers. In the midst are segments of other films he created – flashing memories and sights that move forward and backward in time, thoughts on what preceded the war, and the scars it inflicted.

The sirens that cut through the early afternoon Yom Kippur silence caught Gitai, who had just recently been discharged from his mandatory army service and had yet to begin his reservist service, on the cusp of his second year of architecture studies at the Technion. Gitai picked up Uzi Cantoni, his comrade in the Egoz Unit, and drove north to the Golan Heights. Without being recruited, they set out “to find the war.” Unable to join their unit, they arrived at the Ramat David airbase, where they were assigned to an airborne rescue unit – a pilot, co-pilot, physician, and team of four. For five consecutive days, they flew to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefields in the Golan. Back and forth, they carried the stretcher to the helicopter, the hospital, and over again. On the sixth day of the war, 11 October (Gitai’s 23rd birthday), they were sent to rescue a pilot whose plane was hit and ejected into Syrian territory. During the flight, a Syrian missile hit the helicopter. The co-pilot, Captain Gadi Klein, was killed instantaneously; the pilot, Avner Hacohen, managed to land the helicopter in Israeli territory. All the rescue unit team soldiers were injured from the missile’s impact or the helicopter’s crash on the ground. They were evacuated and taken to hospital. Gitai was hospitalized with the rest of the team. A few days later, he slipped out of the hospital and began his afterlife.

"We were seven. Who left Ramat David airbase in the early hours of October 11. Avner Hacohen, Gadi Klein, Nadav Gottlieb, Dr. Zeev Klein, Zaki Zuriel, Uzi Cantoni, and myself. Only six came back. Gadi did not. Dr. Zeev Klein died soon after. All the others still keep body and mental wounds. I said to myself that this reinvestigation of the event that happened fifty years ago (perhaps even scratching again the old wounds) will teach me something. This revisit presents an occasion for deeper learning. I can see again that the camera had served as a shield. The camera acted as a chronicler of our times." - Amos Gitai, from the exhibition catalogue Kippur, War Requiem.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War is one of the most turbulent years in Israel. The legislation forwarded by the government threatens to render Israel a hollow democracy and is tearing Israeli society apart. The Kippur Fighters group stands out among the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets as those who paid the terrible price of that war with their bodies, souls, and the loss of their friends. They are a community of memory fighting for the memory of the war and its meaning.

Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Amos Gitai: Kippur, War Requiem
September 13th, 2023 - January 13th, 2024
Curator: Mira Lapidot | Assistant Curator: Amit Shemma