ABSTRACT
Many films produced in Israel before and after the establishment of the state describe the integration of refugees and Holocaust survivors in the country.1 Although most of them were scripted in English and addressed American audiences, some were created for people who had come to the country for the purpose of settling there.2 Israeli artists and actors participated in some of them, and local institutions such as the Jewish National Fund and Keren Ha-yesod funded all of them. Thus the films can be viewed as a cinematic effort to persuade Israelis as well as others of the justness of the Zionist enterprise, thereby expressing – directly and explicitly – the 'Zionist narrative'3 that prevailed, in various forms, in many popular texts of the time (theatrical productions, children's stories, journalistic reportage, commemorative writings).4 Hence, they will be studied here as 'a case study' in the translation of ideology into the language of cinema and as parallel to similar efforts in other media and genres.
