Ha’aretz, Israel
Feb 5 2012
History in black and white
The family of Armenian refugee Elia Kahvedjian is fighting to preserve
his legacy: thousands of the finest photographs ever taken of
Palestine at the beginning of the last century.
By Nir Hasson
On the counter of the small photography shop Photo Elia in the Old
City of Jerusalem lies an early 20th century picture of the Western
Wall, which appears squeezed among the homes of the Mughrabi Quarter
that no longer exists. To contemporary Israeli eyes, there is
something striking about the scene of worshippers: Women and men are
praying together in public.
Another photograph shows the flight of the German Zeppelin here in
1931. The gigantic airship hovers in black and white like a strange
UFO above the Old City. In a third picture, large sailboats are seen
in the Yarkon estuary; in a fourth, a European-style clock tower rises
above the Jaffa gate and in a fifth the Kapulsky chain of cafes is
seen in its humble beginnings: a small coffee wagon with a sign that
reads “Kapulsky” at the edge of Jerusalem’s Zion Square.
The pictures are part of a collection of about 3,000 photographs taken
by Elia Kahvedjian, a refugee of the Armenian genocide and one of the
greatest photographers in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 20th
century. The pictures, which had been hidden away for 40 years, were
rediscovered 25 years ago and serve to help researchers and
aficionados of Jerusalem probe its past. Thus, for example, the
architects who reconstructed the Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter
(destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948 and rebuilt in 2010 ) were guided
by Kahvedjian’s pictures – as were the Antiquities Authority
researchers who wanted to reconstruct elements of the city’s walls and
gates.
Death march
The only certain fact that family members know about Kahvedjian is
that he was born in the region of Urfa in Eastern Turkey. They do not
know his date of birth or even his original name. Eli Kahvedjian, who
was named after his grandfather, tells that the elder Kahvedjian was
separated from his mother when he was a young boy, and did not even
know his surname. “At an orphanage they asked him what his surname was
and he didn’t’ know, so they asked him: ‘What does your father sell in
his shop?’ He said ‘coffee’ so they called him Kahvedjian,” recalls
the grandson, noting that “kahve” means coffee in Turkish.
“He went with his mother on the death march (the Turkish army marched
masses of Armenian civilians to desert regions of southern Turkey).
“His mother thought his life would be better if she gave him away. By
chance, a Kurdish man passed by them and agreed to take the child, but
sold him as a slave. In his new life Elia was called Abdu and he
operated the bellows for a blacksmith. One day the blacksmith got
married again and the new wife did not want Elia so he was thrown into
the street where he lived from begging,” continues Eli Kahvedjian.
“One day a man came up to him and offered him food, The man took him
into a cave and by chance Elia lost his balance, fell on the floor and
felt that the floor was full of human skulls. He realized he was in
danger and started to run away. The kidnapper threw a sword at him and
wounded him in the leg. Until the day he died he had a scar there.
When I tell this today I get the shivers,” says the grandson.
In the end, Kahvedjian was saved by an American aid organization that
brought tens of thousands of orphans out of Turkey to the Middle East.
Kahvedjian entered an orphanage in Nazareth when he was about 10 or 11
years old, the family estimates. There he was exposed to photography
for the first time, when he served as a porter for one of the teachers
at the orphanage who also worked as a photographer.
Eventually he moved to Jerusalem where he lived in a sort of housing
project for orphans. He started working for the Hananya Brothers, a
well-known Christian family that ran a photography shop adjacent to
the place known today as Israel Defense Forces Square in the center of
the city. When the brothers wanted to close up shop he took out a
large loan and bought it. He very quickly won commercial success.
His grandson believes the explanation of this surprising success lies
in a certain photograph he found a few months ago, in which the
grandfather is seen in a group portrait of the Jerusalem Order of the
Freemasons – a surprising discovery to the family. “Clearly someone
high up helped him but it’s strange that he kept this a secret. His
relationship with us was pretty close,” he says with a smile, hinting
that his grandfather had connections with the British authorities by
means of the Masons. The help from “above” was manifested in projects
Kahvedjian photographed for the British.
He received further help two days before the outbreak of the War of
Independence, relates the grandson. “A British officer came to him and
told him: ‘Get rid of your things and get out of here.’ He took his
negatives to a storeroom in the Armenian Quarter and closed the shop.”
Kahvedjian fled to the Old City and by 1949 he had opened the small
shop in the Christian Quarter that remains there to this day.
Hidden treasures from the storeroom
The thousands of negatives that were hidden in 1948 came to light
again only in 1987, when the family put the storeroom in order.
Eventually the family realized they had a treasure in their hands. The
first exhibition of his works was held in 1990 at the American Colony
Hotel in Jerusalem. According to Eli Kahvedjian, “People went wild –
they were hungry for this material. We knew it was a success, but we
didn’t understand just how much of a success.”
Since then the shop has become a small museum of black and white
photographs from the early 20th century in high quality prints. Most
of the customers are tourists. Beyond their historical and
anthropological value, the photos are stunning in their precise
composition and capture of inspiring moments and perspectives. For the
most part, the pictures deal with everyday life: vendors in the
market, shoeshine boys (including a Jew polishing an Arab’s shoes )
and caravans of camels.
One of the photos became the focus of a political controversy last
year. The picture, a portrait of a Palestinian family taken in a
citrus grove at the end of the 1930s, served as the basis for artist
Eliyahu Arik Bokobza’s painting “The Citrus Grower.” MK Aryeh Eldad
(National Union ) protested the Knesset’s purchase of the painting for
its permanent exhibit, claiming that it was an attempt to depict the
past from an Arab perspective, and suggest that “we robbed and
expelled them.”
In 1998 the family published a volume of several dozen photographs
entitled “Jerusalem Through My Father’s Eyes,” sold only in a small
shop in the Christian Quarter (for NIS 230 ), which became a
collectors’ item. The grandson relates that there are those who buy
the book in order to sell it and make a profit. “They sell it for the
same price on the Internet, only in dollars.” And indeed, a look at
the Amazon site confirms that it is possible to buy the book for $225.
The family is especially proud of the quality of the book – the paper
was purchased especially in France and the printing was done under
their supervision. In recent years, however, cheap imitations – using
inexpensive paper and low-quality reproductions – have been appearing
in souvenir shops and bookshops in Jerusalem. “I don’t want to get
rich from this – it’s part of the family’s history,” says Eli
Kahvedjian, “but it hurts me that people are disrespectful. With me
there are no compromises in quality. I give the pictures the respect
they deserve.”
Eventually the family sued three shop owners who refused their demand
to stop selling the pirated book. The defendants tried to argue that
they had not been involved in the forging of the book, but only in its
distribution, and did not know it was a forgery. They also argued that
the photographs do not belong to the Kahvedjian family because the
grandfather had inherited them together with the Hananya Brothers’
studio and there was no proof that he had taken the photographs.
Jerusalem District Court Judge Joseph Shapira rejected their
arguments, prohibited the defendants from continuing to distribute the
book and ordered them to pay the family NIS 63,000 in damages.
“The question of copyright was not with regard to each individual
picture “but rather with regard to the book as a collection,” explains
Deuel Peli of the law firm of Agmon & Co., one of two attorneys who
represented the family. “Somebody forged the whole book but at a very
inferior quality. We hope the trial has created a deterrent effect and
in the near future we will be seeing fewer pirated books. But we still
don’t know who printed the books.”
Today, a photo of Elia Kahvedjian gazes down from the wall at the
family’s shop, hanging among antique cameras that still work. He died
in 1999, at the age of 89, according to the family’s estimate. “He was
an incredibly strong man. He had to have been,” says his grandson,
“otherwise he would not have survived all that he did.”
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/history-in-black-and-white-1.411086