Beyond Moses: Entering the Holy Land with a Cell Phone

The biblical scene of the Children of Israel entering the Promised Land is evoked every time a Jew decides to make aliyah, to return to the Land of Israel in order to settle and make his home there.

The representation of this event with its political and religious echoes has changed throughout the brief history of Israel: from the black and white images of the Mizrahi olim in the fifties to the televised color images of Ethiopian Jews waiting for the airlift, passing through the color film stock showing the Soviet Jews arriving at Tel Aviv airport. All these aliyot have been told using images conveying a mass experience rather than an individual one: the packed plains, the crowded terminals, the overflowing ships with their high numbers underlying the urgency of those historic moments.

Today we are seeing a different visual narrative more in tune with the current patterns of Jewish immigration to Israel and with contemporary sensitivity. Partly thanks to the lightness of digital media and to the wide possibilities of web broadcasting, the aliyah stories of today are told through an individual perspective (like, for example, in the Nefesh be’Nefesh production The Joys of Aliyah): the mass is not, anymore, at the center of the discourse.

From the cinema to the web, from Otto Preminger’s Exodus to Nefesh be’Nefesh, the return to the Land of Israel has become an individual story, a sort of post-Warholian performance.