Testament: At the Creation of the State of Israel

American photographer and journalist Aaron Levin creates a TESTAMENT to the men and women behind the founding of Israel on its 50th anniversary. Transcribed from interviews, sometimes translated from Hebrew, the essays that accompany each portrait tell of the extraordinary events that transformed everyday lives. Shalom Massvari speaks nonchalantly of self-induced starvation, undertaken to make himself small enough to be smuggled out of prison in a suitcase. Eliahu Shavit crouches above the Jerusalem sewer holes he once crawled through as a saboteur, planting bombs. Munio Brandwein gazes at the olive trees he planted where three friends lost their lives.

Along with the ordinary soldiers, civilians, and kibbutzniks who contributed to the independence movement, notable dignitaries share their most personal anecdotes about this remarkable moment in history. Standing warily on the very street corner where he was arrested in 1946, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir recalls disguising himself as a rabbi in an attempt to elude the British, only to be caught by an officer who recognized him by his eyebrows. Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres sits surrounded by books in the library of David Ben-Gurion's house in Tel Aviv, once the center of so much military planning. Chaim Herzog, the former president and ambassador to the United Nations, pauses by the rough road he helped carve through the Judean hills to relieve the siege of Jerusalem. And the last two surviving signers of Israel's Declaration of Independence, Zerach Warhaftig and Meir Vilner, revel in the memory of dancing in the streets.