Lia van Leer

Lia van Leer (; ; 8 August 1924 – 13 March 2015) was a Romanian-born Israeli arts administrator and film archivist. A pioneer of art film programming and film archiving, Van Leet was the founder of the Haifa Cinematheque, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, the Israel Film Archive and the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Biography Lia Greenberg was born on 8 August 1924 in Bălți, Kingdom of Romania (present-day Moldova) to a Bessarabian-Jewish family. Her father, Simon Greenberg, was a wheat exporter and her mother, Olga, was a WIZO volunteer. She attended a public high school and spent summer holidays in the Carpathian mountains. In 1940, her parents sent her to Palestine to visit her sister Bruria, a dentist, who had immigrated in 1936 and was living in Tel Aviv. She never saw her parents again.

In July 1941, the Germans murdered her father and other Jewish community leaders. Her mother and grandmother were deported to Transnistria and died in a concentration camp. Lia moved to Jerusalem in 1943 to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1952, she married Wim Van Leer, a Dutch engineer, pilot, playwright and film producer, and settled in Haifa. They founded the country's first film club in 1955.

"There was no television back then ... and we had a 16 mm projector that had come as a gift from my father-in-law. Each Friday we would have friends over to watch movies. Our house became the most popular in Haifa", she recalled.

In 1995, she headed the jury at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival.

Awards In 2004, Lia van Leer was awarded the Israel Prize for her lifetime achievement & special contribution to society and the State of Israel. She won a prize for her volunteer work from Israeli president Chaim Herzog in 1988.