At the time he was killed, in 1953, the photographer Naftali Oppenheim was the supervisor of guard duty in Kibbutz Ein Gev, on the eastern shore of Lake Kinneret. A drowsy soldier mistook him for an infiltrator and shot him at close range. Oppenhein was killed instantly. He was 41, married and the father of two daughters, aged 13 and 9.

Fifty-three years after Oppenheim's death, a random selection of 46 of his photographs are now on display in the foyer of the Rothschild Building at the Eretz Israel Museum in Ramat Aviv. This is not a thoroughly researched retrospective with a catalogue and an analytic text. According to Kinneret Palti, from the museum staff, who hung the photos, she chose them together with Nadav Man, from Kibbutz Merhavia, who for the past 10 years has been engaged in historic documentation.

Dr. Rona Sela, a researcher and curator, who viewed the photographs that are on display in the exhibition, says: "Oppenhein frequently photographed boys and girls in the nude, in a posture that looks erotic, and from the little I saw in the exhibition I have to note that he was not the only photographer who did so at the time. Julian First from Haifa photographed children in bursting sexuality, tender girls who look like Lolitas in his photographs."

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Sela reflects on the significance of displaying such photographs today, without any attempt to interpret them: "Don't we have to consider the ruinous consequences that imagery of this kind could have? Don't we have to ask why this type of photography, like that of First and of Oppenheim, didn't create a fuss? Isn't this part of Zionist photography, which presented an idyllic facade, while in the backyard serious wrongs were committed and never documented?"

Because no researcher of photography or professional curator of photography has yet seen all of Oppenheim's work, it is difficult to answer such questions. Perhaps the answers will be provided when a comprehensive exhibition of his work is held.

Naftali Oppenheim was born in 1912 in Giessen, Germany, the only child of parents who engaged in high-class tailoring. He received his first camera, a Leica, from his parents when he was 15 and started to study photography in evening courses at a lens factory. He developed his photos in the family bathroom. In university he studied physics, chemistry and optics, but was forced to cut short his academic schooling by the Nazi race laws.

The anti-Semitic discrimination further heightened his belief in Zionism, and he began to take courses in agriculture at a farm outside Giessen in order to prepare himself to immigrate to Palestine. He then joined a "core group" of the Halutz (Pioneer) movement in Frankfurt, whose members not long afterward were among the founders of Kibbutz Ein Gev. Arriving in Palestine in 1937, they based themselves at Hatzer Kinneret, on Lake Kinneret, where they worked as farmers and earned extra money from odd jobs in nearby Tiberias, until they were ready to found their kibbutz.

The historian Muki Tzur, from Kibbutz Ein Gev, has written about the first days of the new kibbutz, which was founded by the union of two core groups and established the settlement secretly in July 1937, at the place where the resort village now lies. This was at the height of the Arab Revolt, and the 40 founders lived in five huts surrounded by a wall and a tower with a searchlight; their link to the outside world was a small boat. The correspondent of a Nazi newspaper who was there at the time informed his readers that the Jews were stealing land from the Arabs.

In 1938, Oppenheim contracted polio and was bedridden for about half a year. The doctor told him he could forget about farm work or other manual labor. Oppenheim decided to make photography his profession. He had met his partner, Ida Reches, back in Frankfurt, but their love blossomed in Hatzer Kinneret and they moved into a "family room." When Ein Gev moved to its permanent site, in December 1938, Oppenheim was still in Hatzer Kinneret.

After he recovered from the illness, Oppenheim started to work. "Using crutches, dad moved agilely between the Jordan Valley kibbutzim and started to take photographs. He photographed kibbutz members, children, new settlements and also older ones. Twice a year he went to Degania and Afikim" - two kibbutzim in the area - "and each child would get three photographs on each occasion," Noga Gurevich recalls.

It was not until 1942 that the Ein Gev children joined their parents in the kibbutz. According to Tzur, this was also when the vegetable patch and the groves were planted. The treasurer was Teddy Kollek and there were 200 members. Because of a housing shortage, couples lived in family rooms. When their turn came, Naftali Oppenheim and Ida Reches were married in a modest ceremony. "Dad worked in a small room that he rented in Tiberias, and I remember, when I was about three, how mom and I would wait for his boat in the evening," Gurevich says.

In the kibbutz, her father organized himself a laboratory in a concrete guard post that had been built in 1938, to help protect the new kibbutz. "It was a square room with stairs leading to the second floor, for observation purposes. Dad worked downstairs in a laboratory that had an enlargement machine and developing baths, and also a small room to dry the film. At first we lived in house No. 2 in the kibbutz, but when granddad and grandma came from Germany we moved to a hut and they lived in our house. From the hut we later moved to a room that was 3 by 4 meters without a bathroom." Nira, Gurevich's sister, was born in 1944 and diagnosed with cerebral palsy.

The members earned a living from a range of jobs, including work in the electric power plant at Naharayim, on the Jordan River, and cleaning the homes of affluent residents of Tiberias. But Oppenheim was considered a productive industry in the kibbutz, which was economically hard up, and even had a car of his own. Noga Gurevich, who was 13 when her father was killed, has good memories from Ein Gev, many of whose founders were from Germany and included music lovers as well as professional musicians and an opera singer. She remembers a home in which every free minute was devoted to listening to music, where the concerts in the dining room became routine and where a music festival was founded in 1943.

In the War of Independence, 1948-1949, she and the rest of the kibbutz children were evacuated in boats to Tiberias and from there to Haifa. The return to the kibbutz was an unforgettable event. The houses had been destroyed and Ein Gev became a border kibbutz. Her father continued to work in Tiberias and even opened a small photography shop in which there was a small studio for taking portraits. He no longer had a car; his vehicle was struck by a shell in the war. "Every morning he went to work by bus. He took with a meal in an olive can to which a handle was attached, and he was happy to resemble the kibbutz members who worked in the groves. He continued to photograph family events, children and landscapes. He signed his name with a fountain pen, a Parker 51, in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph, in a round, shapely script."

The members of Ein Gev hoped that the 1951 split in the Kibbutz Hameuhad movement would pass them by. The majority there belonged to the Ihud faction. When the order to split arrived, Oppenheim, who was identified with the left and was on the leadership of the Kibbutz Hameuhad movement, closed his photography shop. "That was his protest," Gurevich says. "Because he was an invalid, he was supervisor of guard duty."

The 70 members of Hakibbutz Hameuhad in Ein Gev decided to move to Ginossar. Oppenheim did not plan to join them, but decided to go with his family to Connecticut, as an emissary of the Jewish Agency. The true reason for the stay abroad was to enable Nira to receive treatment at a special rehabilitative hospital. "On the eve of dad's trip to Jerusalem to arrange the papers, he did night guard duty. At Ein Gev there were guys from the Nahal Brigade, members of a core group from Morocco, who had just come to the kibbutz. Dad went to the guard post, and the soldier, who had fallen asleep, woke up in a panic and shot my father. It was period of infiltrators, and there was a similar event in [Kibbutz] Ashdot Yaakov.

"The doctor and the paramedic informed my mother. I was in seventh grade and one of the caregivers woke me up at 6:30 in the morning to tell me, and it took me 20 years to forgive her. Mom fell apart and didn't want to go on living. She was angry at him for leaving her alone with a sick girl and with another little girl. For years she didn't touch his photographs. Most of them were preserved, because he used a high-quality method of developing. Nothing faded. He was a yekke [German Jew] and everything was organized as it should be."

Noga married Oded Gurevich, from Kibbutz Ginossar, and they had three sons and a daughter. They too were visited by bereavement. In July 1999, at 4:30 A.M., their son Ira left Ginossar in a car and disappeared. The searches for him went on for four years. His body was finally found in a minefield beneath a cliff 200 meters high on the Golan Heights. He was 23 at the time of his death.

Bereavement, Noga Gurevich said this week, continues to weigh heavily, and so she has not found the time to deal properly with her father's estate. "The rights to his photographs belong to me, and this year I thought I would be able to lift my head. I was thinking of a comprehensive museum exhibition and I had already spoken to the curator Guy Raz and with Haifa Museum, but I have bad spells and my energy wasn't enough, so it fell through. Then came the offer from the Eretz Israel Museum to show a selection of dad's photographs."

Dr. Rona Sela: "It's hard to take a deep view of Oppenheim's work without a serious analysis of his archive and without information about the circumstances of his work. A proper study is needed to address his work. At the same time, from the little I have seen, Oppenheim's photography appears to be optimistic, idyllic, soft, what I would define as 'committed Zionist photography.' Like many of the photographers of his generation, Oppenheim mobilized, even if not consciously and not at anyone's invitation, to depict an optimistic reality, a reality that the realizers of the 'dream' wanted to create here. Even if he did not work directly with the national institutions, he internalized the type of photography that they commissioned and created here.

"It's the type of photography that was shown in 2000 in an exhibition at the Herzliya Museum [of Contemporary Art], of which I was the curator. Oppenheim was from a generation that did not ask many questions and was not very critical, and which internalized the Zionist vision."

Gurevich, too, is not pleased with the exhibition, particularly not with the small and random selection. She hopes that a researcher will come who will devote time to the thousands of photographs and situate her father in the history of photography in this country. "Dad would not speak German, and from the moment he arrived here he didn't write or read German, until he succeeded in teaching himself Hebrew from books. German Jews have a conspicuous accent, and he taught himself to speak without an accent. He also wrote Hebrew well. His love of life derived from his love of photography, kibbutz life and his belief in a better world. He was a socialist and an idealist. An introverted, quiet man. The man behind the camera. When he photographed children they became upset, because he worked slowly and directed the light at his pace. He didn't have very many rolls of film at his disposal, and he was meticulous about everything and also maintained an internal calm and peacefulness."