Raised in Dayton, Larry Roberts hopes The Faces of Israel provides an understanding of Israeli diversity between 1982 and 2015.

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

Over Larry Roberts’ 50-year career in photojournalism, he’s worked for United Press International, Agence France-Presse, The Blade in Toledo, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, from which he retired in 2015.

And he shot thousands of photos of daily life in Israel. Raised in Dayton, Roberts and his wife, Sherri, lived in Haifa from 1982 to 1985. He’s made 11 trips to Israel since, some on photo assignments, some personal.

Roberts was on the White House lawn Sept. 13, 1993 to photograph Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s handshake with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo Accords.

It was in 1996 — a year after Rabin’s assassination — when Roberts was back in Israel to photograph that anniversary that he first conceived of a book of his Israel photos.

Hebrew Union College Press in Cincinnati published that book, The Faces of Israel: a Conversation by Larry Roberts, in October. HUC Press selected 100 of his black-and-white Israel photos from 1982 to 2015 for the volume.

The Faces of Israel, he tells The Observer, is not about the conflict.

“I’m about the people living together, which they were back in the ’80s when I lived there and for most of the time thereafter,” he says via phone from Pittsburgh.

“I had very good access to an Arab village (Deir al-Asad), because we had very good friends there. There’s a good selection of the ultra-Orthodox life, people on the street, from elections, the election of Rabin, back to when Yitzhak Shamir was campaigning in the ’80s.”

For each photo in the book, Roberts, 72, wrote a caption about the subjects’ lives.

He hopes The Faces of Israel will give Americans an understanding of the Israeli people, “be they Arabs, Jewish, Christians, that they get an understanding of how people lived a daily life during that time period, prior to what we’re seeing now.”

He calls the book a historical document. “People don’t live this way anymore. This was roughly when they signed the peace treaty, Rabin and Arafat. There was great hope at the time. I hope it gives an understanding of what Israelis are supposed to be: not Jews, not Arabs, not Christians — but Israelis.”

Born in Queens, N.Y., Roberts’ family moved to Dayton when he was a boy. His father went to work for Arthur Beerman and then owned pharmacies on Dayton’s West Side.

Roberts’ parents, the late Francine and Irwin Roberts, joined Beth Abraham Synagogue. Larry’s brother and sister-in-law, Jeff and Connie Roberts, are active members there.

“One of the things that brought me more or less into religion was going to Saturday morning (children’s) services, which were always led by Dr. Lenny Spialter,” he says. “His son is one of my oldest friends.”

Roberts says his upbringing didn’t emphasize Zionism.

“Nobody talked about anything particularly Israeli.”

What got him hooked on Israel, he says, was his first taste of hummus, from a Sunday school teacher who brought in a can for her class to try. “I loved that. And then right about that time, we had Shlomo Carlebach come (to Beth Abraham). He was just great.”

When Roberts graduated from Meadowdale High School in 1970, he began college at Kent State a few months after the shootings.

“We were always worried what was going to happen,” he says. “We had a lot of demonstrations. But some of that is what got me into photojournalism rather than photo illustration, which was what I went there for. I just got more motivated by photographing news than photographing objects.”

He learned about the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 when he was at Kent State’s Hillel for services. “Somebody was operating a shortwave set on the third floor of the Hillel building and came down and announced there was a war in Israel,” he recalls.

At that point, Roberts was a staffer for the Daily Kent Stater and a photographer for the university’s yearbook. “Even though it was Yom Kippur, we left. We walked over to the journalism building and I flipped on the United Press International wire and we started to get information.” He helped raise money for Israel on campus and in Kent.

“Then we celebrated the end of the war, and I had a much better feeling for Israel.”

Roberts also had friends who went to Israel; some made aliyah. He and Sherri took their first trip there in 1979.

“By the second day, I told my wife, ‘We’re going to move here.'”

They made aliyah in 1982. Roberts found work as a photographer and coordinator for foreign communications with the University of Haifa. His wife was an educator with the Health Ministry in Nazareth.

“And we said more and more, we’re staying. The only reason we came back was medical.”

This summer will mark 50 years since his brother Jeff donated a kidney for his transplant.

“The nephrologist (in Israel) told us to go back to the United States because they couldn’t offer me any dialysis I needed. More and more I wanted to go back. And unfortunately, I could only go back on basic trips.

“We couldn’t get medical insurance there. This is my indictment of the Israeli medical system. It was very disappointing, but I accepted that, and just kept going back and shooting pictures.”

Roberts’ most recent trip was in 2015 for a project funded by the Pulitzer Center on the 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. His assignment was to conduct follow-up interviews with Israelis he and another reporter had interviewed in 1998 for the 50th anniversary of the birth of the state.

“There weren’t that many of those people left,” he says. “So we were tweaking the project at that time because Israel was under the knife attacks, where they were stabbing people, and it had become a little more complicated to live there.”

To read the complete February 2025 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.