Moshe Jakubowicz built the city of Jerusalem for fifty-seven years. For most of his working life, he conducted an orchestra of tools and construction workers, and was presiding over building sites. He would receive an empty plot of land and return it to its owners with a perfectly erected structure – a residential building, an industrial facility, a public institution, a bank, a hospital, a hotel. Many of them adorn the city's landscapes and surroundings, including some of its famous landmarks.

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A commemorative torch lit by Moshe at the Yad Vashem institution, (a symbolic act deeply rooted in Holocaust remembrance), illuminates the story of his life, cast in concrete. From the tongues of fire flicker erased childhood images, and memories locked behind walls. Flames of the past intertwine with flames of the present, image pursues image, memory follows memory, weaving a tale of destruction and construction, Holocaust and rebirth, Warsaw and Jerusalem. In the late ninth decade of his life, the walls of silence that he had built around himself for all these years were breached. The sole survivor of a multi-branched family, he reveals his personal story as a brand plucked from the fire of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a boy in Nazi concentration camps; an illegal immigrant on an immigrant ship and an exile on the island of Cyprus; a member of "The Fighting Family" – a Betar movement cadet and an Irgun fighter; a pioneer in rural settlement, a Jerusalem builder; a husband and father, a grandfather to grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a patriarch who planted new roots with branches spread throughout Israeli society.

 

"A Building on an Empty Lot" is a story of something from nothing. Of filling the void. Of daily action free of hyperbole and superfluous words. This is the story of one man, Moshe Jakubowicz – the connecting link between a family erased from the face of the earth and a family established on the empty lot.