Doors may close on German Colony’s 95-year cinema Lev Smadar

It looks like Jerusalem’s beloved Lev Smadar arthouse theater may close after 95 years of operation.

The cinema, which was established in the 1920s as the Orient, will close within six months, according to Ynet Jerusalem, due to ongoing losses from parent company Lev movie theater chain, which said it will leave its Jerusalem location.

The theater chain has another four years on its lease, but can leave with a six-month notice, according to the report.

“Lev Smadar is a magical and mythological Jerusalem institution, and one of the beloved cultural institutions in Jerusalem — but with the current rental conditions, issues of maintenance in the building and closing the restaurant in the space, we can’t continue to operate it,” the Lev management said in a statement. “We’ve experienced more than a few battles in order to keep it open. The theater and its audience are important to us and we’re trying to reach a new agreement that will allow us to continue to operate the theater.”

It isn’t the first time that the movie theater, a single-screen, standalone cinema in the city’s historic German Colony neighborhood, is threatening to close.

In the past, when neighbors threatened to have the theater closed for its noisy disturbances on Shabbat — it’s one of the few Jerusalem movie theaters that have remained open on the day of rest — or because of its location on prime Jerusalem real estate, customers rallied and made sure it stayed open.

In 2016, the theater was under threat again because of a faulty ceiling that the owner didn’t want to handle and Smadar fans started a petition-crowdfunding effort asking concerned residents to buy a NIS 300 membership for 10 films at the theater as a way of raising money to help defray the costs of the renovation.

The Lev chain and the municipality matched the crowdfunding and the theater was saved, again.

Lev Smadar is one of the few remaining cinemas in the country not located within a larger mall complex, and for years had a café on the premises that was also open on Shabbat, but was closed during the COVID pandemic.

It catered to the tastes of the surrounding neighborhood, often running more esoteric foreign and Israeli films, with double features during the weekends.

The theater was long owned by a pair of sisters, then by the husband of one of them, and has been part of the independent Lev movie theater group since the 1990s.

The theater, first called Orient and then Regency, was renamed Smadar in the 1940s after a newspaper competition.