JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Uri Zohar, an avant garde Israeli satirist and filmmaker who left the secular arts when he embraced ultra-Orthodox Judaism and became a rabbi, died on Thursday aged 86, the Culture Ministry said.
Born in Tel Aviv, Zohar was a bawdy icon of the Israeli bohemian scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He wrote, directed and starred in cult films such as “Metzizim” (“Peeping Toms”) and “Big Eyes” and was a regular on the TV sketch show “Lool” (“Coop”).
He grew religious in middle age, appearing on screen in a skullcap until finally withdrawing from popular culture for an ascetic life of biblical scholarship in Jerusalem.
Asked how he regarded his former career, Zohar told an interviewer: “I respect it, the way a mature adult remembers his childhood. But there’s no escaping the fact that I was a child.”
In a statement, the ministry mourned Zohar as “among Israel’s greatest artists and a cornerstone of Israeli culture”.
(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Alison Williams)
