Boundaries
As an artist, I am drawn to closed religious communities, particularly those that live in isolation, and in 'Boundaries,' I capture my rare opportunity to photograph an ultra-Orthodox personal tisch and convey the intrigue of their world and its distinctiveness from my own."
In "Boundaries," I present a closed religious community which lives in the ghetto - as a closed-off and isolated community. They close themselves off from the outside world, and the western world isolates them from it. To the world they seem strange and foreign and therefore they are frightening and worrisome. Their world intrigues me very much, I am also a religious Jew, but not like them. They are called 'ultra-orthodox.' I had rare opportunities to photograph them at a personal tisch that only a few are invited to. As a woman I sat in the women's section.
I experienced the tisch from the female point of view. The men are the ones who sang and danced, tasted the challah and tasted the wine which was poured for the most distinguished of those gathered. - The women sat upstairs and could observe the celebration only through the glass. But I still felt that the women around me were excited by the size of the gathering.
In the public space the joy was different, the families were like any normal family I know, the fathers played with the children, the women chatted and served food, I observed their intimate moments, in personal prayer in the public garden, and in loving embrace in view of the sea. Only their clothes were different. The men with white shirts and tzitzit sticking out, and the women with long skirts and head coverings. I felt that they needed to create boundaries between themselves and the world and differentiate themselves from us in order to have an identity different from ours. And it is easier for them to create a sense of belonging to a community, a community other than mine.
Are differentiation and boundary-setting the key to creating an identity, or is it rather the opposite?