Encounters in Jerusalem
Portraits of a city at prayer
BY Ethan Eisenberg
Photography by Ethan Eisenberg
For 2000 years Jerusalem has existed for the world more as an idea than a physical place. The idea of the holy city, special in the eyes of God, has attracted pilgrims, crusaders and conquerors of all three of the world’s major monotheistic religions.
Today, the city presents a microcosm of the broader conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and my first trip there in 1994 began as a personal project of photographing areas affected by the peace process. Jerusalem’s energy, hysteria and violence come from the dense concentration of competing groups—Eastern and Western, religious and secular, local and foreign, Muslim, Christian and Jew, each with its own intensely expressed attachment to the city. Participation in public ritual is an assertion of difference and expression of identity. Increasingly, the line between religious celebration and political demonstration appeared blurred, so that all types of public gatherings seemed a way of staking a claim in the ongoing territorial struggle. In such an environment, I wondered to what extent faith could exist as private expression without being drawn into the arena of public dispute. Coming from Toronto, a city with limited history, I was curious to explore to what extent daily life in Jerusalem is dominated by the weight of the past, and how far it is possible to find a form of refuge from it.
Participating in a demonstration for the release of Palestinian
prisoners, the world of these teenage girls combines the T-shirt movie
star images of popular culture with the harsher realities of Middle
East politics.
Evening prayers are held before a political demonstration in support
of West Bank settlements by men whose religious beliefs include the
idea of a greater Israel given to the Jews by God.
A short distance from the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest site in
Islam, a Muslim man prays on the floor of his barbershop in the Old
City while his colleagues wait for customers.
Young Palestinians outside the Lion’s Gate attempt to keep Israeli soldiers from entering the Old City—the riot follows Friday prayers at the start of the Al Aqsa Intifada.
Women of the Ethiopian Coptic sect pray by
prostrating themselves on the ground.
In the schoolyard of a Hasidic day school in the ultra-orthodox neighbourhood
of Mea
She’arim, education consists largely of protecting the young from the
corrupting influences
of the modern world.
Outside an after-party at a nightclub near the border between Jerusalem and the West Bank, a young woman seems unaware of the Druze woman selling food behind her.
A pilgrim collapses on the Via Dolorosa,
the supposed path of Christ’s journey to
the Crucifixion.
An elderly woman lays out candles on the steps of a
tomb at the foot of the Mount of Olives believed to be the
biblical burial site of the Virgin Mary.
