Lia Greenberg was born on August 8, 1924, in the
Bessarabian city of
Bălți, then in
Romania, now in
Moldova, to a
Jewish family. Her father, Simon Greenberg, was a wheat exporter and her mother, Olga, was a
WIZO volunteer. She attended a public high school and spent summer holidays in the Carpathian mountains. In 1940, her parents sent her to Palestine to visit her sister Bruria, a dentist, who had immigrated in 1936 and was living in
Tel Aviv. She never saw her parents again. In July 1941, the Germans murdered her father and other Jewish community leaders. Her mother and grandmother were deported to
Transnistria and died in a concentration camp. Lia moved to Jerusalem in 1943 to attend the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1952, she married Wim Van Leer, a Dutch engineer, pilot, playwright and film producer, and settled in Haifa. They founded the country's first film club in 1955. "There was no television back then ... and we had a 16 mm projector that had come as a gift from my father-in-law. Each Friday we would have friends over to watch movies. Our house became the most popular in Haifa", she recalled. In 1995, she headed the jury at the
45th Berlin International Film Festival. ==Awards==