New drama ‘The Eichmann Trial’ at Jerusalem’s Beit Ha’am takes same stage as actual trial |
The trial of notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann was held from April 11 to August 15, 1961, at Jerusalem’s Beit Ha’am, then a recently completed theater temporarily reconfigured to serve as a courtroom capable of accommodating 750 observers.
Until then, much of the younger Israeli generation had not known the details of what happened to Jews in the Holocaust.
Foreseeing the horrific testimony, prime minister David Ben-Gurion insisted that the trial be held in a large hall with capacity for extensive media coverage. The premier wanted the world to hear what the Jewish people had endured during the Holocaust when, for the first time, Holocaust-survivor witnesses stood before the audience and told their harrowing stories.
Several of those accounts are part of “The Eichmann Trial,” a new play written by Motti Lerner and directed by Ilan Ronen about the Eichmann trial. Exactly where the senior Nazi party member was prosecuted 65 years ago as survivors shared emotional stories, the play reenacts chilling accounts of their testimonies about what happened in the war, in concentration camps, in ghettos, and in the forests.
Well-known Israeli actor Igal Naor, in the role of Eichmann, sits onstage in a facsimile of the armored glass booth used at the trial, with the defense and prosecution on either side.
Behind the booth is a metal framework of platforms and stairways, used by the actors entering and exiting the trial, and where complex diplomatic relations between Israel and West Germany are acted out behind the scenes.
“I waited to write this,” said Lerner. “The question was, how would I distill months of a trial into a play? That was the big question.”
Lerner is no newcomer to works about the Holocaust; “Kastner,” “Kapo........