Forgotten Album

Faces of Hashomer

Before you is an exhibit that seems to have experienced everything in its lifetime. The days when people carefully flipped through its pages, laughing at the photos or nostalgically recalling old friends, are long gone. Now, only moisture, cold, and dirt remain. The cover is missing, the pages are falling apart, and half of the photos have turned into fragments. Yet, despite all this, it endures.

The album is filled with hundreds of faces, showcasing boys and girls, members of the Hashomer Hatzair scout organization. It captures their gatherings, picnics, and farewell parties before repatriating to the Promised Land. A closer look might reveal names written next to the photos—handwritten, likely by the album's owner, in Yiddish and Hebrew.

Between 1920 and 1930, this photo album belonged to Aron Diner from Kaunas. During the interwar period, many Jews decided to leave Lithuania and build new lives in the Promised Land. The album eventually made its way there, but what happened to it afterward remains unknown. After a century, it was found in Israel, though in a poor state of preservation.