Hasamba on Screen: The Israeli Children’s Adventure Books and Their Films

Picture a gang of kids with a hidden headquarters called the Electric Cave, a password culture, a strict code of honor and a habit of outwitting grown-up crooks the police cannot seem to catch. For several generations of Israeli readers, that gang was Hasamba. The books sold in enormous numbers, and in 1971 the gang finally made it to the big screen. That first Hasamba film became a fixture of Israeli television for decades, and a 1985 sequel followed. This is the story of the books, the two movies and what has been made of the gang since.

The books behind the movies

Hasamba is the creation of Yigal Mossinsohn (his name also appears as Mossinson in English sources), a novelist and playwright born on December 25, 1917, in Ein Ganim, near Petah Tikva, who grew up in Tel Aviv and died there on May 1, 1994. Adult readers and theatergoers knew him for very different work. His play Casablan premiered at the Cameri Theater in 1954 and later grew into the musical Kazablan, which became one of the best-known Israeli stage and screen musicals. He also wrote novels for adults, among them The Road to Jericho (1950) and Judas (1963).

The children’s series began almost by accident. According to the standard Hebrew reference accounts, Mossinsohn started telling the stories for his son, who wanted more Tarzan adventures, and he decided to give him a homegrown hero instead. The tales first ran as a serial in a children’s weekly in 1949, and the first book appeared in 1950. Its title explains the name: Hasamba is a Hebrew acronym for Havurat Sod Muchlat Be-hechlet, which translates roughly as “the absolutely, positively secret gang.”

Mossinsohn kept writing Hasamba adventures for the rest of his life; sources give the total as 44 or 45 books. The series sold more than a million copies in Israel. In 2001 the first five books were reissued in modernized Hebrew, and in 2010 the original texts were republished too.

The gang and its enemies

The core cast is easy to remember, which is part of the appeal. Yaron Zehavi is the commander and Tamar his deputy. Around them are the comic double act of Fat Ehud and Skinny Uzi, and Menashe the Yemenite, among others. Later books bring a second generation of leaders and even Yaron and Tamar’s son. The villains recur, too. The most famous is Elimelech Zurkin, a small-time crook with big ambitions who keeps turning up to be beaten again. That repeating rivalry between a disciplined children’s gang and a blustering adult criminal is the engine of both films.

The 1971 Hasamba film: credits at a glance

The first Hasamba film adapted the fifth book in the series, Hasamba Ve-Na’arei Ha-Hefker, a title usually rendered in English as Hasamba and the Lawless Kids or Hasamba and the Outcast Boys. It opened in Israel on October 2, 1971.

A few names in that table went on to much bigger things. Shlomo Artzi, cast as the gang’s leader, became one of Israel’s best-known singers and songwriters. Ze’ev Revach, who played Zurkin, built a long career as a comic actor and director of popular Israeli comedies. Adam Greenberg, the cinematographer, later moved to Hollywood, where he shot major studio features including The Terminator (1984). Ehud Manor, who wrote the lyrics for the opening song, was among the most prolific lyricists in Israeli popular music.

The story, spoiler-light

Zurkin is back, and this time he is recruiting street kids into a gang of his own. Hasamba, operating from the Electric Cave, sets out to stop him. One member goes undercover inside the rival gang and is caught, and the children uncover a plan to rob a bank by tunneling into its vault. The finale involves a police chase, and the ending gives the gang a chance to show that their idea of justice includes helping families in need. It is a caper film pitched squarely at young audiences, with songs, slapstick and a villain who is more blowhard than menace.

Part of the shooting took place at a pool in Ramla, according to Hebrew reference sources. Beyond that, detailed production records for the film are thin in published English-language material, and I have not found a reliable account of its budget or its exact box-office results, so I will not guess at them.

From hit to perennial

What made the 1971 Hasamba film a cult object was not its first run but its afterlife. For many years Israel had a single television channel, and that channel broadcast the film again and again, particularly around Independence Day. Children who watched it in the 1970s and 1980s often first met Hasamba on screen and then went looking for the books, rather than the other way round. It is the kind of film people quote to one another without remembering when they first saw it, much like the holiday-rerun favorites in other countries that we cover in our cult movies section.

Hasamba and the Horse Thieves (1985)

Fourteen years later a second film arrived, Hasamba Ve-Shodedey Ha-Susim, or Hasamba and the Horse Thieves. Its title matches the third book in the series, and it works as a loose sequel to the 1971 film, though with an entirely new young cast.

In this one, Zurkin’s old gang has broken up and he has found a new partner. Together they steal four mares from a kibbutz, and Hasamba, who have not forgotten their old enemy, set out to recover the horses and catch the thieves. Sefi Rivlin, one of Israel’s best-loved comedians, took over the villain’s role. Hebrew cast lists also credit Mossinsohn himself in a small part as a police commissioner, a nice bit of authorial mischief.

The sequel never achieved the status of the first film. That is the consistent verdict in Hebrew sources, and it fits a familiar pattern: a follow-up that arrives after the original has already become a shared childhood memory is competing with nostalgia, not just with the earlier movie.

Stage, comics and the 2010 television revival

The gang was on stage long before it reached cinemas. A theatrical version was produced at the Ohel Theater in 1952, and later productions followed for children’s theater companies. A play adapting the first two books appeared in 1985, and a 1998 musical, with music by Yaron Kafkafi, adapted the same opening adventures again.

Hasamba also invited parody, usually the surest sign that something has become part of a culture’s furniture. The cartoonist Dudu Geva and writer Kobi Niv produced a comic send-up, and the novelist Etgar Keret wrote a parody story.

In October 2010 the gang returned on television in Hasamba 3G, a 17-episode series that imagines the original members as seventy-year-olds. Ze’ev Revach came back to play Zurkin nearly four decades after the first film, and Oded Kotler played the adult Yaron. The show was aimed at children and their grandparents at once, which is about as clear a statement of the franchise’s reach as you will find.

Why the Hasamba film still matters

Israeli cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s is often discussed in terms of its popular comedies and its serious personal films. Children’s features were a smaller part of the output, and the 1971 Hasamba film stands out as one of the few that became a genuinely shared reference point. It took a bestselling literary property, cast a young singer at the start of his career and a comic actor in his prime, and turned out a breezy adventure that families kept returning to through repeat broadcasts.

Kids’ gang adventures were a staple of mid-century popular fiction in many countries, from Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives onward; Hasamba is Israel’s local entry, with its own landscape, slang and humor. If you enjoy tracing how national cinemas adapt their favorite books, our beginner’s map of world cinema classics is a good companion.

What survives and how to see it

Both films are complete and have been shown on Israeli television many times, so neither is in any sense lost. Israeli feature films of this period are preserved and catalogued by the country’s national film archives, including the Israel Film Archive at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. Where the films are available today, it is through licensed services or archival screenings rather than through any single official source, and availability differs by country. The books, meanwhile, remain in print in both their revised and original forms.

English-language writing about the films is scarce, so I have kept to details confirmed in published Hebrew reference sources and left out what I could not check, such as the box-office figures.