Simcha Jacobovici (born April 4, 1953) is a Canadian film director, producer, free-lance journalist, and writer. He is a three-times Emmy winner for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.
He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from McGill University and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Toronto. He hosts the The Naked Archaeologist on VisionTV in Canada and The History Channel in the United States.
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Jacobovici was born in Petah Tikva, Israel to Romanian-born Jewish parents, Joseph and Ida, who had moved to Israel after surviving the Holocaust. In 1962, when he was nine years old, the family moved to Montreal, Canada, where his father had been offered an engineering contract.
Jacobovici is an Orthodox Jew. He is married to Nicole Kornberg and has four girls and one boy.
From 1978-80, while a graduate student in Toronto, he was the chairperson of the North American Jewish Students' Network. He founded and chaired Network Canada, the country's national union of Jewish students, and founded the Canadian Universities Bureau of the Canadian Zionist Federation. He also served on the National Executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
In 1979, Simcha Jacobovici was president of the International Congress of the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS). For his Zionist work on North American campuses, in 1980 he was awarded the Knesset Medal. During the same year, he served as special consultant on Nazi war criminals to the Solicitor General of Canada.
Simcha Jacobovici is also co-founder of the Canadian Association for Ethiopian Jews (CAEJ) in 1980, and the Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief in 1985. From 1987-1993, he served on the executive committee of the Toronto Centre for Creative Arts Therapy. In 1993, he served on the Ontario Region Executive of the Organization for Educational Research and Technological Training (ORT). Since 1993, he has served as the president of the Riverdale Jewish Community Centre which he co-founded.
Jacobovici's films include:
In the 1983 documentary, Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews, Jacobovici tells the story of Ethiopian Jews, also called Falasha (strangers). According to the documentary, the group was conquered by neighboring tribes in the 17th century and suffered persecution. After the movie, during the Israeli Operation Moses (Mivtza Moshe), the Falasha were evacuated from Sudan during a famine in 1984 and airlifted to Israel.
The 2002 documentary The Struma, directed by Jacobovici, tells the story of the Struma, a ship chartered to carry Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to British-controlled Palestine during World War II. On February 23, 1942, with its engine inoperable and its refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed the ship from Istanbul harbor through the Bosphorus out to the Black Sea, where they abandoned it without food, water, or fuel. Within hours, in the morning of February 24, it was torpedoed and sunk by the Soviet submarine Shch 213, killing 768 men, women and children, with only one survivor, a 19 year old man, making it the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of the war.
The movie won the Audience Award Portland International Film Festival as best documentary.
Impact of Terror, produced by Jacobovici and directed by Tim Wolochatiuk, is a 2004 documentary about Israeli victims of terrorism struggling to cope in the aftermath of the August 2001 Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem.
The Exodus Decoded is a 2006 History Channel documentary created by Jacobovici and the producer/director James Cameron. The documentary explores evidence for the Biblical account of the Exodus. Its claims and methods were widely criticized both by Biblical scholars and by mainstream scientists.
Jacobovici suggests that the Exodus took place around 1500 BC, during the reign of pharaoh Ahmose I, and that it coincided with the Minoan eruption. In the documentary, the plagues that ravaged Egypt in the Bible are explained as having resulted from that eruption and a related limnic eruption in the Nile Delta. While much of Jacobovici's archaeological evidence for the Exodus comes from Egypt, some comes from Mycenae on mainland Greece, such as a gold ornament that somewhat resembles the Ark of the Covenant.
The documentary makes extensive use of computer animation and visual effects made by Gravity Visual Effects, Inc., based in Toronto. It runs for 90 minutes and was first aired in Canada on April 16, (Easter Day) 2006 (Discovery Channel Canada). Shown in the US on August 20, 2006 (History Channel US), UK on December 23, 2006 (Discovery Channel UK) and Spain on December 25, 2006 (Cuatro).
Bryant G. Wood, a Young Earth creationist, criticizes The Exodus Decoded, saying that "Jacobovici does more harm than good since he mishandles the archaeological evidence, hence providing fuel to skeptics who wish to undermine the Exodus." In an episode of The Naked Archaeologist, Carl Ehrlich, a biblical historian at York University, Toronto, noted that Jacobovici's hypothesis that an earthquake may have been responsible for the collapse of the walls of Jericho requires inserting an earthquake into the Biblical narrative. Consequently, Ehrlich labels Jacobovici a Velikovskian.
The Lost Tomb of Jesus is a documentary co-produced and first broadcast on the Discovery Channel and Vision TV in Canada on March 4, 2007, covering the discovery of the Talpiot Tomb. It was directed by Jacobovici and produced by Felix Golubev and Ric Esther Bienstock, while James Cameron served as executive producer. The film was released in conjunction with a book about the same subject, The Jesus Family Tomb, issued in late February 2007 and co-authored by Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino. The documentary and book's claims are the subject of controversy within the archaeological and theological fields, as well as among linguistic and biblical scholars.
Jacobovici argues that the bones of Jesus, Mary and Mary Magdalene, along with some of their relatives, were once entombed in this cave, working with statisticians, archaeologists, historians, DNA experts, robot-camera technicians, epigraphers and a forensic expert to argue his case. This claim is rejected by most biblical scholars of archaeology.
Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner, who was among the first to examine the tomb when it was first discovered, said the names marked on the coffins were very common at the time. "I don't accept the news that it was used by Jesus or his family," he told the BBC News website. "The documentary filmmakers are using it to sell their film."
A symposium at Princeton University in January 2008 reignited media interest in the Talpiot tomb. Time magazine covered the event as a re-opening of the argument about the tomb. "I feel vindicated," Jacobovici told Time. "It's moved from 'it can't be the Jesus' family tomb' to 'it could be.'"
Geza Vermes issued a statement saying that the arguments for the Talpiot tomb are not "just unconvincing but insignificant."<ref name="2007 Alumni/ae Reunion">2007 Alumni/ae Reunion</ref> Vermes added, "[d]iscounting a handful, headed by James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici - the maker of the documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus - most of the fifty or so participants shared this opinion."
The Naked Archaeologist is a television show produced for VisionTV in Canada and History International in the US that is hosted and prepared by Jacobovici together with Avri Gilad. The show ultimately reviews Biblical stories, then tries to find proof for them by exploring the Holy Land looking for archaeological evidence, personal inferences, deductions, and interviews with scholars and experts. Subsequent to its original run on VisionTV, it was picked up in the U.S. by The History Channel and its sister network, History International.
The episode "A Nabatean by Any Other Name" won the Special Jury Prize at the 8th International Archaeological Film Festival in Brussels.
Jacobovici was involved in the production of a documentary shown in March 2010 on the National Geographic Channel in which he claimed that Atlantis has been found in Spain, and has said that evidence found by Hartford University Professor Richard Freund includes the unearthed emblem of Atlantis, and the biblical angle that has been largely overlooked.
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