Biography
Lia van Leer (Greenberg) was born on August 8, 1924 in the Bessarabian city of Bălţi, then in Romania, now in Moldova. Her father, Simon Greenberg, was a wheat exporter and her mother, Olga, was a WIZO volunteer. She attended a public high school and spent summer holidays in the Carpathian mountains. In 1940, her parents sent her to Palestine to visit her sister Bruria, a dentist, who had immigrated in 1936 and was living in Tel Aviv. She never saw her parents again. In July 1941, the Germans occupied Beltsy and murdered her father and other Jewish community leaders. Her mother and grandmother were deported to Transnistria and died in a concentration camp. Lia moved to Jerusalem in 1943 to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1952, she married Wim Van Leer, a Dutch engineer, pilot, playwright and film producer, and settled in Haifa. They founded the country's first film club in 1955.
"There was no television back then", Lia said, "and we had a 16 mm projector that had come as a gift from my father-in-law. Each Friday we would have friends over to watch movies. Our house became the most popular in Haifa." This film club became the Haifa Cinematheque. The Van Leers' private collection of films was the basis for the Israeli Film Archive, founded in 1960.
In 1973, a Brazilian businessman, George Ostrovsky, donated a large sum of money to build a cinematheque in the Hinnom Valley below the Old City walls. Teddy Kollek and the Jerusalem Foundation mobilized more funding from friends in the Hollywood and around the world. The Jerusalem Cinematheque opened in 1981, and Lia van Leer was named its first director.
After the death of her husband in 1991, Lia inaugurated the Wim Van Leer Award for High School Students to encourage young filmmakers. In its first year, eight films were submitted; in 2008, 90 films contended for the prize.
In 1995, she was the head of the jury at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival.
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