Jakob Jonilowicz

Jakob Jonilowicz was born in 1908 in Vilnius

Jonilowicz was born in 1908 in Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents owned a pharmacy. He finished high school in his city and studied art photography at the University of Vilna.

Around 1930 he went to Paris to study cinematography. He trained as an assistant to the American cameraman Henry Stradling. In 1936 he returned to Vilna and shot feature films and documentaries in Poland, including Yidl Mitn Fidl.

During World War II he was held in the Vilna and Kovno ghettos and later in the Stutthof and Dachau camps. His first wife, the film editor Dolly Kobryner, was murdered by the Nazis at Stutthof. After the war he lived in a displaced persons camp near Munich and shot Long Is the Road there in 1948.

He moved to Israel in 1949. He was among the founders of the film workers union of the Histadrut and served as its chairman. He sat on the Israeli Film Council and shot many Israeli films, and in 1961 he was one of four cameramen who filmed the Eichmann trial.

In Israel he married his second wife, Hanna, and their daughter Tali was born in 1953. He died in 1975 and was buried in the Southern Cemetery.