David Rubinger

David Rubinger was born in 1924 in Vienna

David Rubinger was born in Vienna in 1924 as an only child. After the Anschluss in 1938 he was expelled from high school for being Jewish. In 1939 he reached Mandatory Palestine with Youth Aliyah and lived on a kibbutz, while his father went to England and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust.

In 1942 he joined the British Army and served as a driver in a transport unit in North Africa, Malta and Italy. He later moved to the Jewish Brigade. On leave in Paris, a French girlfriend gave him his first camera.

He joined the Haganah in 1947. In the 1948 war he fought in the Jerusalem area and became an officer. Near the end of the war he moved to the photographic mapping and reconnaissance service.

After the war he opened a photo store in Jerusalem. In 1951 Uri Avnery hired him at HaOlam HaZeh, and he later worked for Yedioth Ahronoth and The Jerusalem Post. From 1954 he worked for Time-Life for more than 50 years, and in 1967 he photographed paratroopers at the Western Wall.

He married Anni, and they had 2 children. Anni died in 2000, and his partner Ziona Spivak was murdered in 2004. He received the Israel Prize in 1997 and died in 2017.