On August 24, 2024, Dan Hadani marked his 100th birthday. He celebrated this joyous event with a party, almost an act of defiance against life itself – against everything he experienced as a child in Poland, against everything the State of Israel has been through, and against the terrible ordeals of the past year – letting everyone know: I’m still here!
He uses a walker and is easily tired, but his mind is clear and sharp and his memory promises to provide us with a fascinating story, spread out over a century, a story which cannot be done justice even with a thousand pictures.
In the hundred years that have passed since his birth, he has managed to reinvent himself a number of times and live multiple lives with the resourcefulness of the proverbial cat. In his most significant incarnation, the one based in Israel, he built one of the most important visual archives collected here with his own two hands, a monumental life project for one man.
In 2016, that project faced destruction – at the hands of its creator. After decades of devotion to photographs and documentation, Hadani decided that the two million negatives, meticulously cataloged and a photographic testament to events in Israel from 1965 to 2000, would be destroyed.
***
Dan Hadani was born Dunek Zloczewski in Lodz, Poland.
He began life as a Polish Jew raised by a Zionist family. As a child, he saw his parents take pride in their work and craft, and that striving for professional excellence became a part of him. From his father, he learned the difficulty of living as a Jew in a state that was not his own, dealing with emerging antisemitism, and the importance of mutual aid and charitable works.
He spent his youth trying to survive in the Lodz Ghetto and then in Auschwitz, where he met Dr. Mengele and where he was largely able to avoid the wrath of his Nazi workmasters. He managed to survive and to offer support to others who suffered worse fates. He used everything he had – knowledge of languages, the ability to learn quickly, as well as technical skills – in order to show how necessary he was to the SS men. At the same time, he served as an assistant to the ghetto doctor and tried to do everything he could to help his friends in need.
In 1945, Hadani was freed from Nazi captivity. His parents and his only sister, however, had already been murdered by the Nazis. Although he had other options, Hadani felt it was clear that he would fulfill his parents’ unwritten will, realizing their Zionist dream and making Aliyah to Israel.
A year later, Hadani went to study seamanship in Italy. He passed the course with flying colors and immediately returned to Israel: “I came on Aliya Dalet – 3,000 people with forged passports. I had a Dutchman’s passport, a Jew who lived in Israel.”
A day after he arrived, he was enlisted in the navy of a country that had just been established: “I didn’t know a word in Hebrew; here and there ‘Shalom’ or words like that,” he recalled. “But on the ship the orders were in Hebrew. I often asked ‘What’s that word?” and they translated it for me. That’s how I learned. There were a hundred and twenty soldiers on the ship, the vast majority of them new immigrants and they gave us orders in this way. That’s how I learned Hebrew.”
It wasn’t the first time Hadani was thrown into a situation alone and without basic knowledge. As he had done before, he used his amazing resourcefulness and survival abilities to develop within the navy, from a new immigrant who knew no Hebrew to an officer who served for 15 years.
And then, somewhat surprisingly, his last appointment in the IDF was as a press officer for the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. The change had a dramatic effect on him: “In the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit I received the shock of my life. I met with reporters at Sokolov House, suddenly I heard all the stories.” Instead of making efforts to hide secret operational activity, Hadani now had to think differently. As a press officer, he was responsible for managing, accompanying, and briefing journalists and photographers from Israel and around the world, helping them cover events related to the IDF. This, he admits, was his apprenticeship in journalism.
When he was released from the IDF a year later, he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do next. He was 41 years old: “The moment I got out of the army, I had an idea what I would do. I wanted to form an association, a group of photographers, and open a company, a cooperative of press photographers. I wanted to be the one organizing it, just like I was during my time in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.”
While serving in the unit, Hadani had identified the need for a professional agency for photography and press purposes, which could quickly cover events across the country: “I wanted to establish a large cooperative and see to people’s livelihood. I saw that we lacked a specific body in the country, that we weren’t initiating contact with people from outside of Israel, with the foreign press.” Everyone who heard the idea tried to talk him out of it, saying it was too big a project for him and that he would fail before he even started.
Despite this, he gathered together some photographers he knew to pitch the idea: “Some 10, 12 photographers came, and I told them what I wanted to do. And then one photographer got up in the middle and asked: ‘Tell me, you want us to run out and take pictures while you sit in the office? I’ll be running around and you’ll get money to sit at a desk? You want me to hand over my salary to you?”
Nothing came of the meeting, but Hadani wouldn’t give up and decided to go it alone. For many long months, he worked as a freelance photographer, even getting writing opportunities from foreign journalists: “If I needed a photographer, I ordered a photographer for pay – on one condition: that the negatives were mine,” he said. When at one point he couldn’t find a photographer, he bought a camera and began taking his own pictures.
Slowly but surely, Hadani gained success and clients, ultimately realizing the dream he envisioned when he first left the army. He established the Israel Press & Photo Agency, or IPPA. He worked with salaried and freelance photographers, both in Israel and around the world. Over the course of 45 years of activity, the agency covered almost every important event in Israel: if there was a big concert, government meeting, or terror attack – Hadani’s photographers were there. In fact, if you were reading newspaper reports about Israel during this time, you probably saw thousands of his agency’s photographs.
Hadani took care to properly preserve all the photos he received and all the rights he acquired. With admirable care for detail, he cataloged and maintained the negatives from all the photos which reached the agency, quietly cultivating an archive which documented much of life in the State of Israel at ground level.
Hadani is proud, and rightly so, of his journalistic achievements: The photo of the father of Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, reading a newspaper with the article on the murder, became world-famous. A photo showing Menachem Begin bending over before Anwar Sadat and Jimmy Carter (he was picking something up) during a peace treaty ceremony was also a hit and a nice change from the generally rigid statesmanship of the time. There was also an article featuring the first photos of legendary Soviet WWII-era spy Leopold Trepper following his arrival in Israel. Trepper immigrated in 1974 and spent the last few years of his life in the country. To this we can add hundreds of thousands of pictures, piles of film documenting major cultural and political events as well as wars and terrorist attacks.
When he decided to close the agency and retire, he didn’t know what would become of the archival treasure trove he had developed over decades: “I created something that doesn’t exist in the country. It was my own little quirk. It’s hard for me today to understand how I even ended up doing it. You cultivate it. You keep perfecting it. And it’s hard. It’s hard to let go…”
He tried to find a place which would take his life’s work in its entirety and understand its incredible inherent value. After a few years of fruitless searches and failed deals, he decided with sadness to destroy the project he had dedicated much of his life to: “I was about to buy two shredders to begin destroying the negatives. I cried. To destroy such a thing? I knew there was a treasure here.”
Fortunately, Hadani discussed his intentions with his daughter-in-law, Batya Calderon, who quickly appealed to Dr. Hezi Amiur, curator of the Israel Collection at the National Library. Amiur immediately understood the value of this archive and succeeded in convincing Hadani to provide the National Library with the entire collection, which could then serve the broader public.
Despite the great difficulty in saying goodbye to the illustrious project he’d cultivated for years, Hadani had finally found a home for his life’s work: “I am happy and I am content,” he said. “I am very proud that it’s in the best hands I could have dreamed of.”
*
Even at 100 years old, Hadani refuses to sit back and take it easy. Last year, he built up a website on the Wix platform which tells the story of his life and his journalistic achievements, as well as other challenges he overcame in life. He still drives a car and takes care to remain curious and incisive, even today: “I expect and am waiting to enjoy the future. And I will rest a little, because I work very hard.”
With the look of a sober, knowledgeable man, keenly aware of the past and looking firmly towards the future, he made a very specific request in honor of his birthday: “I want to see a good future. I want to see the state I built. Today I don’t see it.”
