Features
Do you want a challenge? Try opening a restaurant in Mexico – four different times in six years
By BERNIE BELLAN In December 2021 Myron Love wrote a story for The Jewish Post & News about former Winnipegger Megan Kravetsky.
How I happened to give Myron that particular assignment was an interesting story in itself. I had begun delivering Meals on Wheels for the Gwen Secter Centre in the summer of 2021 – which, if you can recall, was a period when we were still enduing periodic shutdowns due to Covid. As a result, the Gwen Secter Centre stepped up the number of meals that it began producing – not only for Jewish clients, but for hundreds of non-Jewish clients as well.
I wrote several times about the incredible effort that the staff at Gwen Secter put into producing what ultimately became over 600 meals a week, but that’s not the point of this story. This story is about food though, so there’s a connection.
In any event, beginning in the fall of 2021 I began delivering kosher meals for Gwen Secter on a weekly basis to a number of clients, some of whom some have remained on my list ever since.
One of those clients was a woman by the name of Joanne Field. Like most of my Meals on Wheels clients I developed a nice rapport with Joanne. One day she asked me if I’d be interested in doing a story about her granddaughter, whose name she told me, was Megan Kravetsky. According to Joanne, Megan had been operating a popular restaurant in Puerto Vallarta by the name of Blake’s Bar & Grill, and Joanne thought that readers of the paper who might be heading to Puerto Vallarta that winter would be interested in dropping into Blake’s.
As it turned out, I asked Myron Love to do that story instead of doing it myself because we were coming up to our Chanukah issue at the time and I didn’t have time to talk to Megan and write a story – but I did think that the Chanukah issue presented the perfect opportunity to let readers know about Megan and her restaurant.
That was in December 2021 and, even though my wife and I have been to the Puerto Vallarta area several times – and really love it there, what with Covid putting a crimp in travel plans for several years, it wasn’t until this year that I had the opportunity to head back to Puerto Vallarta. While I was there, I thought, I’d like to touch base with Megan and visit Blake’s myself.
Which is how I came to do a completely different type of story than I expected to write.
You see, Megan Kravetsky’s experiences in Mexico can fill a book – and a good part of that would be a horror story. Try this one on for size: Not only was her business badly affected by Covid in 2020 – just after she had moved into what was then the second location for Blake’s – after having moved from the first location because it was just too small – this past October, after having moved yet again into a different location for Blake’s in what Megan thought was going to be a great location – Hurricane Lidia swept through Puerto Vallarta and Blake’s was forced to close down.
Still, Megan persevered. She had opened another small pop-up restaurant last May called Drop Shot Chill n Grill in an area well known to many Winnipeggers who spend time in Puerto Vallarta, near what is known as the hotel zone. But, in another series of unfortunate circumstances, this time having to do with a very nasty landlady (who repeatedly cut off the electricity to Drop Shot), Megan was forced yet again to close down.
Read on and you’ll find out about the long string of unfortunate events that seem to have accompanied Megan ever since she decided to move to Mexico in 2018, but once you finish reading the story you’re bound to have an immense amount of admiration at how resilient Megan has proven to be.
Here’s some of what Myron wrote in his December 2021 story: “Three years ago, the veteran chef and restaurant consultant came across a deal she couldn’t refuse when she took advantage of an opportunity to buy Blake’s Restaurant and Bar, an established operation in Puerto Vallarta. Megan is now happily living year round in Mexico.
“Now, in truth, the former River Heights kid (Brock Corydon and Grant Park) was no stranger to the Mexican resort community. She notes that her parents, Charles (whose mother is Joanne Field) and Vivian Kravetsky, are long time seasonal residents of the city – spending six months a year there and six months in Winnipeg – and she had visited many times over the years.
“ ‘It was perfect timing,’ she says of her move to Puerto Vallarta.
“ ‘The first year was tough,’ she adds. ‘My Spanish was limited – which made it sometimes difficult to communicate with my staff. Now I am fluent.’
“Kravetsky notes that her original career goal was to become a lawyer (like her father). ‘After five years of university (the University of Manitoba), I realized that that was not what I wanted to do, she recalls.
“Instead, she earned a business degree in management and marketing and went to work in the restaurant industry. She had worked in the restaurant trade part time throughout university. Over the next 15 years, Kravetsky worked successively for the McDonalds chain, Moxie’s, the Olive Garden and Montana Steak House.”
Before I met with Megan on March 16 – at the location of the most recent incarnation of Blake’s Bar & Grill in the port area of Puerto Vallarta known as Puerto Magico, which is where passengers from cruise ships disembark, I had a chance to see for myself the damage that Hurricane Lidia had done to her restaurant. The interior was all covered with tarp, but I was able to see through a hole in the tarp. I was quite surprised to see that the restaurant itself was largely intact – tables and chairs all in place, dishes, utensils and cooking equipment all in place, but the windows to the outside were all blown out. That piqued my curiosity and became the subject of part of our conversation.
Still, as my wife Meachelle and I sat down with Megan to enjoy a beverage in a nearby coffee shop and listen to her story, I couldn’t help but be impressed by Megan’s very positive attitude. As it turns out, Megan had been in my son Jordy’s class at Brock Corydon School (of which I was not aware. Also, somewhat coincidentally, Jordy, who now goes by the name Jitendradas Loveslife, also lives in Mexico, in a town populated by New Age former hippies known as Ajijic.)
I asked Megan how she came to own a restaurant in Puerto Vallarta?
Megan explained that she had gone about as far as she could as a restaurant manger in Winnipeg. As Myron noted, Megan had worked for McDonald’s, Montana’s (helping to open their Kenaston location where she worked as a line cook), Moxie’s Bar & Grill, Olive Garden, also Famous Dave’s – all before she had even turned 30.
Megan had been traveling to Mexico with her parents and siblings for years, she told me, and fell in love with the country. So, in 2018, she took all the savings she had accumulated and bought Blake’s Bar & Grill in downtown Puerto Vallarta, which had first opened in 2006. Before she was able move to Mexico though, Megan had to acquire a residency permit – which was no easy task, she explained.
You see, in order to purchase a business in Mexico, one needs something called an “RFC” (which translates from the Spanish to Federal Taxpayers Number).
As Megan told us, “without that (the RFC) you can’t purchase cars, housing, anything. I got my residency before I moved down. You have to do your residency out of country.”
I asked her how she could become a Mexican resident while still in Canada?
She said, “You apply, you have to make a certain amount of money. So I applied three times – within a six month period. I went to Toronto twice. Applied. Denied. Both times. Went to Calgary” – and finally got her residency permit.
But, there’s something else Megan explained that made the challenge of buying Blake’s even more difficult: She wasn’t able to finance the purchase – she had to pay cash entirely – something, we were also told, is par for the course for just about any major purchase in Mexico, including houses.
But, just because Megan was able to buy Blake’s, she wasn’t able to work in her own restaurant, she told me, until she had a work permit. As she explained, “…so you get one year temporary residency, then you apply for a three year extension after that, and then after that, then you apply for your permanent residency. But temporary residency doesn’t include a work permit. That’s the biggest thing, so I had to apply for my work permit to be attached to my temporary residency.”
Megan, however, had forgotten to apply for a work permit – which she would have needed to work in her own restaurant. “But,” she explained, “then when my daughter was born (in 2019) – because she’s Mexican, I automatically became a permanent resident. So I didn’t have to wait for four years – I only waited two (to become a permanent resident)” – thus allowing her to work in her own restaurant.
Now, while Megan’s initial foray into the restaurant business was quite successful, the first Blake’s Bar was too small to accommodate the high number of customers it was attracting. As Megan put it, “the place was too small. It was a very small… very small restaurant.”
And then, in 2020, Covid hit. While Mexico had no sort of rules requiring masking in public places, it did institute rules governing social distancing – with a six feet distance required between tables. “We could only have two or three tables in at one time during high season,” Megan said.
So, in 2021, Megan moved to another location in Puerto Vallarta, in an area known as Plaza Santa Maria. Things were going really well in that new location. It had become a very popular spot for Canadians, especially Winnipeggers, as Megan made sure all Winnipeg Jets games were shown there. (Megan was in that location when Myron contacted her and she was brimming with confidence when she spoke to him about how well things were going.)
There was one major problem, however, as Megan explained: “The landowner there didn’t pay her taxes. So when you went to go take out your licensing, you have to show proof the taxes are. And if they’re not paid, then you can’t take out your licensing. And she owed back taxes of almost five years, which was over 300,000” (pesos – or about $22,000 Canadian dollars).
“And she didn’t want to pay it. So I had no choice,” Megan noted. As a result, after only one year in what had been a very successful location – even if only for a short while, Megan moved yet again, in 2022 – this time to the Puerto Magico location.
The owners of the building where Megan opened what by then had become the third location for Blake’s in only four years had induced her to move there with all sorts of promises, she said: “They had promised us numerous things that they never completed. The passport office was supposed to open upstairs two years ago. Still not open. Another restaurant was supposed to be up there. We were just alone up there. There’s nothing. They made it impossible for guests to get up the stairs. They wouldn’t fix the elevator. It still doesn’t work to this day. It’s been three years…and the whole thing with that is they don’t want to pay the electricity to have the elevator working.
“So they just made it impossible for the cruise ship people to get upstairs or any people in general to get upstairs.” On top of all that, the owners of Puerto Magico didn’t allow Megan to have any signage on the street which would have told tourists that Blake’s Bar was there.
Still, Megan might have been able to turn things around were it not for that hurricane last October. She had developed a great reputation as a restaurateur. (Just take a look at the glowing reviews on Tripadvisor for Blake’s Bar). In addition, Megan is a fantastic baker and she had opened a bakery known called Sweet Temptations Bakery Boutique next door to Blake’s in Puerto Magico. That closed too the same time as Blake’s when the hurricane hit.
You’d think, however, that notwithstanding the damage that a hurricane might have caused, it would just be a matter of time before things could have been repaired and Blake’s would have been back in business – but that wasn’t the case.
While the interior of the restaurant was left largely intact, the windows had all been blown out. So, it’s just a matter of replacing the windows – right? Or, so you’d think. But this is Mexico – and similar to the landlady who didn’t want to pay her taxes in Blake’s previous location, the owners of Puerto Magico haven’t moved to replace the windows that were blown out.
Here’s how Megan described what happened: “So, the whole thing here, after the hurricane hit, when you construct a building here, the windows and doors are property of the plaza. Doesn’t matter if you put them in, they put them in, it’s property of the plaza. You can’t leave with them. Yeah. Same with the floor. So when the hurricane came through and destroyed everything, the first thing they said to me is our insurance will cover it, our insurance is going to cover it, it’s our property.
“So we waited and waited and waited and waited and about two and a half to three months in, they said, nah, our insurance actually isn’t going to cover it. At that point, my own insurance wouldn’t cover it anymore. It has to be done within 24 hours. That’s just how it is.” (Note to readers: Anyone from Winnipeg could identify with Megan. A building burns down and a pile of rubble remains for years. A bridge closes because it’s unsafe and it sits there – unusable, but with no plan to replace it.)
Not one to let anything get her down though, Megan still had her pop-up restaurant, Drop Shot Chill n Grill. As I mentioned at the beginning of this story though, just recently that site too had to close down.
This time it was the landlady who owned the area where Drop Shot was located that forced Megan to close. While Megan leased the space for her location from an individual who didn’t actually own the land where Drop Shot was situated, he had tennis and pickleball courts there. Apparently though, the woman who actually owned the land didn’t like the loud music coming from Drop Shot – even though it wasn’t in a residential area at all.
Again, here’s how Megan described the situation: “In our contract it stated that I was allowed to have live music, barbecue, blah, blah, blah. The landowner who owns the land, who I don’t lease from, owns the hotel behind the parking where the tennis courts are. And she doesn’t like noise. She doesn’t like any noise. Yet, they have music and tennis tournaments and fairs and they have the food park and all that.
“So, during our live music, she would complain constantly, even though our music was only from 3 to 6 – that her guests, one guest in particular, couldn’t sleep – it was too loud. We always abided by the decibel restriction limit; it was never over the decibel limit.”
The story continued: “So she cut our electricity off once when we had the live music – but the second time she did it, I had a generator. She didn’t know that I had a generator going. So she had cut the electricity, but the music was still playing. So at that point she would call the ‘reglamentals’ – the bylaw officers, who would come check and she’d say, ‘There’s really loud music going on at Drop Shot.’ They would come, they would check, they’d check my permits, everything would be okay, they’d leave. That’s when I called the police on her. They’re my friends. They had a very long conversation with her… told her that it’s illegal to cut the electricity, she can’t do it.”
But, as you might expect, the landlady wasn’t about to back down. “It got to the point where she threatened the guy who I was subleasing from that if he didn’t get rid of me, she was going to get rid of everybody.
“She wouldn’t re sign the contract with him. So he’s had his tennis courts and pickleball courts there for over five years. And she said, ‘if I don’t leave, then everybody’s leaving.’ “
So, once again, Megan has had to abandon what had turned into a successful venture – but after dealing with Covid, a landlady who didn’t want to pay taxes, a hurricane, and a landlady who doesn’t like loud music, you’d have to wonder whether Megan is still willing to enter into yet another food venture?
Not surprisingly, she said she is. I asked her “How real is that? How feasible or viable?”
“Oh, it’s very viable,” she answered. “We’re just waiting on the contract to be signed.” Megan added that she has someone who she wouldn’t describe as a partner in her putative venture, but somebody “that’s going to help me.”
Throughout our conversation I had refrained from bringing up the subject that surely must be in the back of many a reader’s mind when it comes to thinking about doing business in Mexico: What about the cartels? Has Megan had any run-ins with the local cartel I wondered? (And when it comes to cartels, Puerto Vallarta is located in the state of Jalisco. Anyone who knows anything about Mexican cartels would know that the Jalisco cartel has a reputation for extreme violence.)
Megan answered though that “They’re not really that visible here… They keep it very under the table here.”
I said though that “the Jalisco cartel is notorious.”
But, Megan responded, “that’s more towards Sinaloa and Chihuahua.”
Still, given Mexico’s longstanding reputation for corruption at almost every level, I asked Megan, “Did you have to pay off people?”
She answered: No, never, never, never had to pay anybody off. You give back and then, you know, everybody takes care of each other.” She went on to describe the excellent rapport she has had with the local police, for whom she has catered a huge feast known as a “masada” every year, at which over 400 police have attended.
It’s hard to imagine someone coming down to Mexico and, within the space of only six years, opening restaurants (and closing them) in four different locations, yet still remaining optimistic that she’ll be able to open a fifth in short order.
If and when Megan does open another restaurant – I’d sure like to try the food. If the reviews she received on Tripadvisor for each of her locations are any indication, one thing Megan Kravetsky knows is how to prepare great food – and leave her customers with a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Uncategorized
Why NBA Teams Start Defending Before Half Court
An NBA defender who meets a ball handler near the opposite baseline is trying to interfere with the possession before the offense gets organized. The immediate reward need not be a steal. Making a guard change direction, protect the ball, or find another receiver can interrupt the route into a play. But pressure has several possible results, and slowing that first journey does not necessarily slow the whole game.
In Logan Murdock’s November 2025 report on full-court defense, Phoenix Suns guard Jordan Goodwin described his aim: “Try to make them take at least six seconds off the clock.” That was his target, not a measured average. Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle described another purpose: getting opponents to play faster than they prefer. Both approaches interfere with timing, though one delays the setup while the other hurries decisions.
The shot clock helps explain the difference. In a normal NBA possession following a made basket, the offense has 24 seconds, with the countdown starting when the inbound pass is legally touched on the court. It must also advance out of the backcourt within eight seconds. Crossing half court does not start a fresh shot clock. Time spent getting there leaves less time to create a shot. A defensive deflection that stays inbounds does not restart the countdown.
Defensive pressure also needs careful interpretation in basketball betting. An NBA matchup on the Bovada website cannot be reduced to whether one team presses: the combined score depends on how often both sides get the ball and what they do with their chances. A defender delaying the first pass into an offense can leave less time for a good attempt. A turnover followed by a quick basket has a different effect.
Those possibilities make defensive intensity an incomplete description of a scoring outlook. A team can force its opponent to work harder while creating quick attacking chances for itself. It can also concede an easy chance when pressure fails. Understanding the tactic means separating its purpose from its outcome, rather than treating an aggressive defender as evidence that the game must produce fewer points.
Pressure does not always mean a trap
One defender following the ball is different from two defenders closing around it. The first can contest the dribbler while teammates remain with their own assignments. A trap commits another player to the ball, so teammates elsewhere must cover the passing options and protect the basket.
A stopped dribble changes the contest. Once a player voluntarily picks up the ball, he cannot simply start dribbling again. He can still pivot, pass, or shoot, but moving away from pressure with another dribble is no longer an option. A defender can therefore restrict movement without taking possession. This is also why a guard’s choice to keep the dribble alive deserves attention: it preserves a way to move while searching for a pass.
Watch where the ball goes next. A trap can succeed by forcing an awkward pass that another defender intercepts. The players surrounding the ball do not have to be the ones who take it away. Reaching for a steal also differs from keeping the ball handler contained; abandoning position can give the guard a route past the pressure.
The offense has answers. In the Murdock report referenced earlier, Golden State guard Brandin Podziemski described using his body to shield the ball against smaller defenders and quickness to get beyond longer opponents. Beating the first defender can leave that player trailing, creating a temporary advantage farther upcourt. The remaining defenders then have to respond to an attack before their teammate has time to recover.
The work before a highlight
Former NBA guard Keith Bogans gives a defender’s perspective in his conversation with Vernon Maxwell. Discussing Jaden McDaniels, Bogans says that seeing a defender pick up a superstar across the court gets him excited in the way a dunk or crossover excites other viewers.
*
His reaction focuses on the challenge being accepted. The scorer has someone to deal with before reaching a preferred attacking position. Bogans also describes the recognition that such defensive work receives from teammates and coaches, even when it attracts little attention elsewhere.
The assignment does not end when the scorer passes. The defender still needs to follow the play and be ready for the ball to return. Early pressure can force a star to give up the ball without removing him from the possession. Watching the next pass shows whether the defense has actually disrupted the attack or merely moved it.
When defense creates offense
Indiana scored 19 points off turnovers in Finals Game 6 against Oklahoma City on June 19, 2025. The figure does not isolate full-court pressure.
A change of possession ends one team’s opportunity and begins another’s. The team winning the ball can attack immediately or organize its offense, depending on the space and defenders ahead. Pressure therefore cannot be assessed only by the time an opponent spends bringing the ball forward.
Look beyond the pickup point. Does the offense arrive late but still organized? Does it make a hurried pass? Does the ball handler escape and make the remaining defenders cover extra ground? The first defender can use up time without winning the ball. If the guard gets past him, watch whether the other defenders can stop the drive without leaving someone open.
Features
In new ‘Fauda’ season, the aftershocks of Oct. 7, without a thought for Gaza
By PJ Grisar September 8, 2026
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
When Fauda Season 4 ended an eternity and a devastating war ago, our hero was at death’s door, reciting both the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema, and the Muslim Fatiha.
It was a cliffhanger with monumental implications for Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz), an Israeli Jew who spent his days undercover as a Muslim Arab — an identity crisis long in coming. Zoom out and you can see the doomed duality of Israel and Palestine, Jew and Muslim, connected in a cycle of death and more alike than they may seem.
Season 5 begins bilingually, with Hebrew and Arab definitions of the Arabic word Tha’r, blood revenge, “restoring violated honor or avenging injustice.” This concept is now the point of commonality — not how men pray, but how they seek revenge.
Welcome to a post-Oct. 7 Israel. Doron is in therapy, struggling to recall eight missing hours of his life on the day of Hamas’ attack on the Gaza envelope.
Comrades have left the country — Steve (Doron Ben-David) is protecting oligarchs in London, Sagi and Nurit are in Australia. Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) is now Orthodox, living in a settlement and reeling from the murder of his wife and stepchildren at his now-torched kibbutz. When a Bedouin friend, Salem (Bian Anteer) who lost his son in the raid on Eli’s home, approaches him with a tip on the Nukhba fighter responsible, they depart for Marseille to answer the call of Tha’r.
It would hardly be Fauda if this act of vengeance didn’t give way to a much larger plot. Marseille is the staging ground for Saeed el Hatib (French-Algerian actor Hakim Djaziri), “the Sinwar of Europe,” who is recruiting sympathetic, white continentals for a fresh massacre in Israel.
Fauda has always made some viewers uncomfortable. Massively entertaining, bingeable to those of us who stream it in the Netflix aftermarket, its existence was premised on ongoing injustices in the West Bank and Gaza and the violence that bursts through their borders. (The BDS movement labelled it a “war-crimes glorifying” series;” Haaretz called it “morally dubious.”)
And yet as late as the last season it contained very real criticism of Israel’s conduct, including its costly campaigns to recover captured soldiers and the torture used to extract information on their whereabouts. The show always alluded to real operations — Cast Lead, Brother’s Keeper — in dialogue. But because it can’t merely mention an attack as raw and monumental as Oct. 7, and because it has no desire to question the response to it, it chooses to recreate its savagery.
Episodes 7 and 8, flashbacks to that day, are front-loaded with a trigger warning and a disclaimer that you can skip them and still be able to follow the main plot.
It’s hard for me to recommend those episodes. If not exactly atrocity porn, their central, race-against-time set piece is too anchored in recent events and constructed too much like an action movie. It feels in a sense exploitative, even if intended as a tribute. (To give them credit, both Lior Raz and his co-creator Avi Issacharoff, who said they “wrote from their trauma,” were on the ground helping the south of the country evacuate in the aftermath.)
The new season starts with the promise of complexity. It opens on a grieving Muslim father and shifts to a milksop accountant who worked for Hamas, seemingly tortured by Eli in a blind rage for a crime he didn’t commit. Could an excessive devotion to Tha’r, a tribal code of retribution, be the diagnosis of the show’s creators of Israeli society at this moment?
If it is, it’s not a critical one. The villains are the villains, and, most revealingly, they now number people with no connection to the conflict.
Hatib’s enlistment of white Europeans for a mass-casualty terror attack services a trite narrative of postcolonial guilt finding an outlet in the pro-Palestinian cause. It works on another level too: This fighting force is squaring off against Doron’s corps of Mizrahi Jews, whose mere presence dismantles the lie that Israelis are themselves all white colonizers, and that Israel and the European empire of yore are in any way analogous.
When, back at mission control, the counterterrorists speak of “suspicious-looking Europeans” who are “in their 30s,” the derision for this type of fellow traveller is palpable. Their standard bearer, Mélanie Laurent, formerly Tarantino’s “face of Jewish vengeance,” plays Anne, a blonde, “high middle-class Catholic French woman” who straps up with C-4, a keffiyeh ever-draped around her neck. Through her, and in a quite literal way, the show suggests the Western love affair with Palestinians — which in this season’s logic means Hamas — is misguided.
All the while, we never see Gaza, where much of Season 3 was set, with some among its population humanized. We never reckon with the destruction there. We hear about it, and a kind of lip service is paid to the crime of collective punishment — the sort that we hear at the end of almost every season — but it’s secondary to storytelling as elegy and justification. One could just have easily placed the Hebrew word Zachor before that first cold open: Remember what they did to us.
At one point, after a shootout with more blood spatter than I ever recall seeing on the show, Doron empties his clip into an enemy with the words “this is for October 7.” Seconds later, in a Shin Bet command room his handler Gabi (Itzik Cohen, whose between-seasons weight gain is a running joke) quips, a la Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this.”
He’s not the only one.
In the past week I’ve chatted with some folks older than me — they don’t know each other and are largely to my right on Israel — who don’t relish the thought of another season. Not just because they don’t want to watch Oct. 7 reenacted, but because following the exploits of Israeli security agents has vastly different optics after the Hamas-Israel war, unprecedented settler violence and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recently-stated ideal scenario of killing “30 or 40” Palestinians in Gaza each night.
This may well be the privilege of the diaspora, but the fatigue points to a shift in attitude that’s worth paying attention to. If these horrors are out of sight, out of mind this season, they’re top of mind to many who are watching — and many others who might have once tuned in.
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. Read full bio →
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
“Jerusalemites” – Photographer Sharon Gabay talks about his new book in a spectacular photo essay
By JOANNE PALMER (reprinted with permission from the New Jersey Jewish News and the Jewish Standard) If every person is a world, as our tradition tells us, then a city is filled with so many worlds that it’s impossible to imagine all those rubbing-together universes.
That’s particularly true of Jerusalem, one of the world’s oldest cities, at just about 5,000 years old, give or take; a recent demographic study, done in 2026, estimates its population at around 1,181,760. It has grown remarkably quickly; maybe people are drawn by its ancient, stony beauty, or by the history and other-worldliness that shimmers around it, or by the vibrant, modern cacophony of its diverse residents.
For the last 15 years, Sharon Gabay, a highly successful professional photographer whose bread-and-butter is stunning headshots, party pictures, and portraits of politicians and other social and legal strivers, has wandered through the city, just looking and taking pictures. He’s a 15th-generation Yerushalmi, and although now he lives in the Judean hills, in Moshav Nes Harim, near Ein Kerem and Beit Shemesh, he goes to Jerusalem every week to photograph what he sees.
He’s published six books of photography about Jerusalem. All are both beautiful and emotional. The most recent of them, “Jerusalemites,” is the newest and perhaps the most emotional, created with love, gestated in fear, and now born into a world that perhaps surprisingly radiates with hope.
Okay. What could that possibly mean?
It means that on October 11, 2023, Mr. Gabay went to Kfar Aza. “Everybody who could do anything did something, and I wanted to do something too,” he said. Some kind of response to the barbarism and terror and grief of the Hamas attack. Kfar Aza, one of the southernmost kibbutzim in Israel, was one of the hardest hit. “Because I am a documentary photographer, I asked to join Zaka,” Israel’s emergency response, rescue, and recovery nonprofit organization, “the first time they went in. I went in with them.
“I took pictures. I had two exhibitions using these pictures” — one of them “Holocaust in the Village,” is online — “but it hurt my mind. It was a trauma for me. And I didn’t touch my camera for two years. I just stayed in my studio in Nes Harim, taking psychiatry pills and trying to forget what I saw.
“And during this time I decided to make this book. I sat on it for two years, just learning how to do it effectively.
“There are almost no words in this book. Only pictures. And this is the message: We all live together 99 percent of the time. What the world sees about Jerusalem in the news is what happens maybe three or four percent of the time. All the rest of the time, all 99 percent of the people, other people around the world don’t know about. So I decided to make this book.
“The little text that I do have is in three languages — Hebrew, English, and Arabic. The languages spoken by the people of Jerusalem.”
The small number of Hebrew words in the text are written in a font created from the handwriting of Aner Shapira, who was 22 when he went to the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Simchat Torah — October 7, 2023. He took cover in a shelter with a group of other young Israelis, and he saved many of their lives by throwing seven explosive grenades that Hamas operatives threw into the shelter back out at the terrorists. The eighth exploded in his hand and killed him.
When Aner died, “he left behind a lot of songs that he wrote. They took his handwriting and made a font of it, and I chose to use it for the text.
“He was a Yerushalmi and he loved the city. He wrote about the diversity inside the city, and how you can see everything there. So I decided to put the text in his handwriting as a memorial to him.
When he began to make the book, Mr. Gabay had to look through the enormous archive he’d created. For 15 years he’s roamed the city. His camera is small, old, and unthreatening, a beaten-up Fuji with a visible crack on the case. He takes pictures unobtrusively, he said. He doesn’t ask permission. He just shoots. Usually people don’t even know they’ve been photographed. Sometimes they come across pictures of themselves in his work, and sometimes they email or message him, asking for a copy. Of course, he said, he always sends one.
Culling his vast collection of images was not easy, Mr. Gabay said. Putting it together “made me go out on the streets again.” The vast majority of the photos in the book were taken before October 7, but he took some later, to fill in logical gaps. Even now, with the book finished, he wanders the city’s streets one day every week, camera in hand.
As he prepared the book, he winnowed the vast library of images to 2,000, and from there he whittled it down to 300. For that first cull, “I went through them one by one, me and my cat, hiding from the missiles when they came in, because this is the Middle East. I did it day by day by day by day, until I managed to take it from one and a half million to 2,000.”
The second selection process “was much easier, because by then I knew how I wanted to do it. It is not a random collection of pictures. It is a story, from beginning to end; it is the long story of a city. So there is always a connection from each picture to the picture before and the picture after. But this took a long time.”
“The book turned out to be very successful. I sold all the copies before I launched it. One museum in Israel took 1,000 copies. It got to Herzog”— Israeli President Isaac Herzog —“and Huckabee” — Mike Huckabee is the U.S. ambassador to Israel — “and they both wrote letters about the book.
“Now I am working on the second edition. I want to distribute it to all the Jewish communities and Christian communities and Muslim communities that don’t hate us. There are no politics in this book. It is just people. The background to the pictures is all black because the only light we have in Jerusalem is the people.”
His message, Mr. Gabay said, is that “Jerusalem is not an apartheid city. Everyone lives here.
“I was raised in Jerusalem,” he said. “When we were little, my friends and I went to the Muslim quarter. Nothing happened. Once in a while there’d be some trouble, but most of the time we lived together with no trouble. My family has been here for more than 300 years. I have a picture of my great-great-grandpa in the Old City of Jerusalem. We are connected to the city, all my family is, and we really love it.
“Jerusalem should have tourists the way Vatican City does. People don’t come to Jerusalem.” His attempt to cure that problem is to show the city’s glories on social media. “I have more than 100,000 followers, and they are from all over the world,” he said. “I have Iranian followers and Saudi followers. Suddenly they see the city and they are surprised. They want to come to visit. They all of a sudden see that if they come here, they won’t be arrested because they are Muslim.
“I want to dedicate my work to telling the truth about Jerusalem.”
Mr. Gabay still takes pictures in Jerusalem because “I always go out to see if there is something new, because there is always something new to take pictures of in Jerusalem.”
He also takes pictures of politicians, and that’s a particularly busy area now because of the Israeli election set for October 27. “Today I had a member of the Knesset from Ram, the Muslim party. Mansour Abbas’s party. They want to participate in Israeli politics. They say, ‘We have a life here, and we want to live.’ And on the other side, I did a lot of people from the government we have now. Which, you know, is not the best government we’ve ever had.
“I tell them to their faces what I’m thinking. They know me. They know that I have a big mouth, and that I never, ever lie. So every politician from every side, even the one who was here today, sees the book. And I’ve never had anyone ever say that it’s one-sided or that it doesn’t tell the truth. It’s about all the tribes of Israel.
“I’ve put all my knowledge about Jerusalem and its people in the book, and I try to bring in exactly what happens in real life. I don’t try to stage anything. I am a viewer. I come. I see. I take a picture, and I save it. And people can see what life is like in Jerusalem.
Mr. Gabay also spends a great deal of time doing pro bono work. He takes photos for “At Eye Level,” a nonprofit that works with people with autism. His website showcases much of who he is and what he does; readers can learn more about his book here.
He has a traveling exhibit for the book; the photos can be printed locally so there are no shipping or customs costs, and he often comes to speak in the United States, talking about “Jerusalem and its unique human diversity.
“This book, ‘Jerusalemites,’ is about hope,” he said. “It tells people around the world that what you know about Jerusalem isn’t right. We live together, day by day, all of us, everyone. Yes, we have been at war for three years, but Jerusalem is still vibrating.
“Jerusalem is a hope that if you let people just live, they can live together, and they can make it a great city.”
