After the Polish Jews Getzel and Lea Schmuklersk fled Zgiertz, their third son, Israel, was born in Strasbourg on February 18, 1871, shortly after the Franco-Prussian War.
The Schmuklerski family moved to the Swiss community of Aussersihl on the outskirts of Zurich. There, Getzel achieved social advancement, and his son Israel began a banking apprenticeship at his parents' request in 1886.
At the age of 22 Israel Schmuklerski emigrated to the USA. He trained as an actor and performed in the ensemble of the German-language Pabst Theater in Millwaukee. He decided to shorten his name to «Helmar Lerski» and gave up his meaningful Jewish first name, «Israel.»
1905
On February 24, Lerski married the actress and stage photographer Emilie Bertha Rossbach.
1910
First success with portrait photographs of his fellow actors in Milwaukee. The local press introduces Lerski as a photographer of award-winning photographs. He then joined the Convention of the Photographers Association of America.
Move to Berlin. His contacts with the film industry would shape his work for the next 12 years. He soon began working as a cameraman and lighting technician, often with Germany's most famous directors and actors.
One year after the death of his first wife, Lerski married assistant director Anneliese Wolfkamp in Berlin, whom he had met years earlier on a film set.
By the mid-1920s, Helmar Lerski was increasingly working with his camera again. The models for his portrait photographs were people from his professional and personal circles, including actors, writers, publishers, a comedian, and a sculptor.
For the series «Köpfe des Alltags», Lerski was in search of anonymous, ordinary people in Berlin. He showed the complete series of pictures at the Kunstbibliothek exhibition in December 1930. At the same time, a book with 80 illustrations was published by Hermann Reckendorf.
For his photography project «Visages Juifs» Lerski and his wife traveled to Palestine and, as the Nazis grew more powerful in Germany, they settled in Tel Aviv at the end of 1932.
Helmar Lerski was approached by the Jewish trade union Histadruth, a quasi-governmental organization called «Jewish Agency,» to direct a propaganda film. The film, «Avodah» is about reconstruction work, the immigration of young people, and the search for water to make the barren land fertile.
Lerski spent three months taking 175 photographs of one single face in the blazing morning sun. All of these pictures for his project «Metamorphosis Through Light» were taken on the roof terrace of the house at 42 Ahad-Haam Street in Tel Aviv.
Lerski became honorary president of the newly founded «Palestine Professional Photographers Association». On the roof terrace of his apartment he gave introductory courses on his lighting technique to its members — all victims of the German Nazi regime.
Starting in 1942, the British Army formed a Jewish battalion. Lerski was commissioned by the Keren Hayesod reconstruction fund to photograph soldiers for an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum entitled «Fight and Work».
Lerski's last film and directorial work was commissioned by the Zionist women's organization «Hadassah», founded in the USA in 1912. «Adamah» tells the story of a young Zionist who survived the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Following the United Nations General Assembly's decision to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, hostilities erupted, and massacres of the civilian population occurred. Hopes for coexistence between Jews and Arabs are dashed. In March 1948, Helmar and Aneliese Lerski left the country and found a new home in Zurich.
Helmar Lerski no longer worked as a photographer in Zurich, but his pictures were exhibited in Zurich in 1948/49, in Hamburg in 1954, and in Luxembourg in 1955. Lerski continued to participate in the book project «der mensch mein bruder» which was to be published by the East Berlin Verlag der Kunst, but it was not published until 1958, two years after his death on September 9, 1956.