A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

One day in 1955, David Ben-Gurion, the legendary founder of Israel and the nation's Prime Minister at the time, surveyed a group of photographers who had clamored into his office to record a ceremonial event. Noting that TIME's David Rubinger was absent, Ben-Gurion quipped, "Where's the one with the ginger beard?"

Rubinger's beard is no longer ginger, but he is still taking photographs for TIME. Rubinger, 63, has captured so much of his country's history on film that this week's cover story on Israel and its 40th anniversary is illustrated almost entirely with his work. Perhaps inevitably, many of Rubinger's pictures mirror his own experiences as a refugee, as a soldier and as a citizen of Israel.

Born in Vienna, Rubinger fled to British-occupied Palestine in 1939, after Hitler annexed Austria. During World War II, Rubinger returned to Europe to fight the Nazis with Britain's Jewish Brigade. Along the way, two things happened that changed his life. He met his future wife Anni, a concentration- camp survivor who is a TIME picture researcher. Almost as important, he picked up his first camera, an Argus-35, and quickly decided that taking pictures should be his career.

Perhaps his most famous photograph shows three young paratroopers standing in front of Jerusalem's Western Wall shortly after the Old City was captured by Israeli troops in 1967. Rubinger has kept up with the trio; one is a gynecologist, another manages a folk-dance troupe and the third is a farmer. One of his most affecting shots depicts a boatload of exhilarated Moroccan Jews catching sight of Israel for the first time. "Photographs, like wine, improve with age," says Rubinger. "My favorites are the ones taken years ago that show human beings, having survived horrors, being remade into new men and women." Rubinger has taken some of his least favorite photographs during the Palestinian uprising of the past few months. "Pain has taken the place of pride in documenting events," he says.

Next month an exhibit of Rubinger's photographs spanning 40 years of Israeli life will open in Jerusalem. He selected pictures that focused on ordinary Israelis and leaders in less formal moments. The retrospective, like the book that will be published in conjunction with it, is titled, appropriately, "Witness to an Era."