Following the screening, his grandson, Ben Peter Weissenstein, gave a talk about Rudi’s life and legacy, together with the story of the whole Weissenstein family. 

 

Rudi Weissenstein was born in Jihlava, in what was then Czechoslovakia. He is best remembered for documenting the everyday lives of Jewish immigrants in the 1930s. Remarkably, the only existing photographs of David Ben-Gurion declaring the State of Israel’s independence in 1948 were also taken by Weissenstein. Over the course of his life, he created an extraordinary archive of over one million negatives, which now resides in his Photohouse.