Rabbi Uri Zohar journeyed from brazen celeb to sincere seeker — and invited the entire country to join the ride

Photos: Eli Cobin, Mishpacha archives

A few hours after we left the tiny machsan on Rechov Zichron Yaakov that Rabbi Uri Zohar had called home for the last decade, we got a phone call.

On the line was Uri Zohar himself.

“I thought about it again, and I’m asking you not to publish the interview,” he requested. “I really try to avoid media,” he said, “and I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’d appreciate if you could honor my request.”

We shelved the interview (knowing from experience that we were taking a risk), missing a “scoop” perhaps, but happy that we were helping this giant of a man keep to his resolution and continue living in the shadows. Little did we know that just a few weeks later, it would become his eulogy.

Former actor and director Uri Zohar, icon of the secular Israeli entertainment industry in the 1960s and early ’70s until he turned his back on it all to study Torah, passed away last week at age 86, after four decades of creating his own Har Sinai.

Half of Rabbi Uri Zohar’s life was spent as Israel’s most famous cultural icon, and then he spent the second half of his life trying to escape that same public adulation. At a certain point, after he became a baal teshuvah, he even tried to purchase the broadcast rights for all the movies he had acted in. But he wasn’t able to do it, and to this day, he’s remained a sort of cult figure in the Israeli entertainment world.

“Kapparas avonos,” he would say when someone spoke to him about his earlier life.

The Tel Aviv–born Zohar was known for his outsized personality, sharp wit (he was always a bit of an intellectual, having earned a university degree in philosophy), shoulder-length wavy hair, and most of all for his comic sketches and 1960s “bourekas” films — slapstick movies that poked fun at nearly everything sacred in the fledgling state and became Israeli culture classics. While other films aimed at a new genre of cynical viewers were mostly commercial failures, Uri Zohar was able to astutely analyze the economic situation of the Israeli cinema.

When Zohar disappeared from Israel’s pop culture scene in the late 1970s to learn Torah and eventually become a chareidi rabbi in Jerusalem, it was a shocking move. But the public’s loss was the Torah world’s gain. Uri Zohar switched venues, but he was still larger than life.

He was the most tangible example of the words of Chazal, “In the place where baalei teshuvah stand, complete tzaddikim cannot stand.” And he was not only a baal teshuvah, he was also a tzaddik. He eschewed materialism to an extreme, having dedicated his days and nights to one thing: Torah, Torah, and more Torah — yet his essential personality continued to sparkle, schlepping along unaffiliated Jews on his journey.