Features
The late Rabbi Zalman Schachter’s time in Winnipeg recalled at lively evening hosted by Jewish Heritage Centre
(This article originally appeared in the Dec. 21, 2016 issue of The Jewish Post & News) By BERNIE BELLAN
It was billed as an evening that would be devoted to “Rabbi Zalman Schachter and the Winnipeg origins of the Jewish Renewal Movement”.
Like just about everything else associated with the late Rabbi Schachter (who died in 2014 at the age of 90), it was an evening not without controversy.
The Jewish Heritage Centre promoted the program, which was held Monday, Dec. 12, in the Multipurpose Room of the Asper Campus, as part of “its synagogue series connected with the Synagogues Exhibit at the Asper Campus.”
With the ever-clever Prof. Dan Stone serving as host, the audience of over 100 was treated to a series of reminiscences about Rabbi Schachter’s 19 years spent in Winnipeg (from 1956-75) – a time that paralleled the advent of the “New Age” movement, also a time during which the use of hallucinogenic drugs became highly popular among young people.
The evening featured three main speakers: Rabbi Alan Green, who was given his “smichah” by Rabbi Schachter; Prof. Justin Jaron Lewis, an expert on Hasidism and the organizer of an interview project centering around Rabbi Schachter’s time in Winnipeg; and Alexandra Granke, a graduate student at the University of Manitoba in the Department of Religion, whose Masters thesis dealt with the influence Winnipeg’s Jewish community had on Rabbi Schachter’s thinking.
There was also a contribution from Murray (Moish) Goldenberg, who was a protégé of Rabbi Schachter’s. Goldenberg read a poem devoted to the late rabbi’s memory.
Following the speakers’ presentations, Dan Stone invited anyone in the audience who wanted to tell of their own experience with Rabbi Schachter to speak up. One by one individuals told stories about how Rabbi Schachter touched their lives.
Lest anyone reading this think that the evening was nothing more than a love-in for Rabbi Schachter, however, there were some negative notes struck as well. Although he was undoubtedly a man of great charisma, Zalman Schachter had his detractors. Two themes mentioned several times, both by the featured speakers and audience members, coursed through recollections of his time spent in Winnipeg: his faithlessness when it came to his relationships with women, and his overt championing of drug use.
Following is an account of some of what was said:
Rabbi Green who, Dan Stone told the audience, will be leaving Winnipeg in 2018 to move to Fairfield, Iowa – the centre of transcendental meditation, described first meeting Rabbi Schachter in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
In time, Green became a devout follower of Rabbi Schachter’s, culminating in his receiving his smichah from Rabbi Schachter in Philadelphia, where he found the rabbi “surrounded by a bunch of old hippies” – some of whom “were leaders of the New Left in the 1960s.”
“My first class with him,” Rabbi Green said, “was kind of a Sinai movement for me. It literally took my breath away.”
Rabbi Schachter had a multitude of interests, including “Jewish mysticism, humanism, and modern psychology” among others, noted Rabbi Green. As well, “he was fluent in many languages.”
What impressed Rabbi Green quite deeply, he said, was how Rabbi Schachter “brought together Judaism and Indian mysticism”.
“How often we let fear get in the way of Jewish mysticism,” Rabbi Green said Rabbi Schachter once told him.
Turning to the subject of the Jewish Renewal Movement and Rabbi Schachter’s central role in that movement, Rabbi Green observed that “there are now hundreds of Jewish Renewal rabbis – most of them ordained by Rabbi Schachter.”
It was in Winnipeg, Rabbi Green noted, that Rabbi Schachter “created the first rainbow talit”. It was also here that “the interface between psychedelic drugs and spiritual practice” first took root among Rabbi Schachter and his many followers.
Rabbi Green commented, however, “that I always found this phase of Rabbi Schachter’s life to be somewhat embarrassing”.
Following Rabbi Green’s presentation, Justin Jaron Lewis took the podium to offer some observations about Rabbi Schachter’s time in Winnipeg. Lewis noted that Rabbi Schachter’s own autobiography has relatively little to say about the time he spent here, even though it was a fairly lengthy period. As well, the Wikipedia article about the rabbi barely mentions his time spent in Winnipeg, Lewis also observed.
It was partly because of that vacuum, Lewis explained that, at the behest of his colleague in the Judaic Studies program at the University of Manitoba, Ben Baader, Lewis embarked upon the creation of an oral history project devoted to gathering “memories of Rabbi Schachter during his Winnipeg years.”
With contributions from 28 different individuals, all of whom whose lives were touched by Rabbi Schachter at some point during his time spent in Winnipeg – as the director of Hillel, as the representative of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as a Professor of Religion, and in the many other roles he played, interviews were gathered. Those interviews now reside in a collection put together at the University of Colorado in Boulder (where Rabbi Schachter spent the final years of his life).
(If you would like to listen to any of those interviews simply Google “Winnipeg Jewish renewal”. According to Lewis, however, some of those interviews are not entirely positive in the impressions some interviewees had of Rabbi Schachter.)
The fact that Winnipeg seems to have been almost deliberately obscured in any writing, either by Rabbi Schachter himself or others writing about him, is somewhat of a puzzle for Lewis. After all, he observed, it was here that Rabbi Schachter “began the chaotic and colourful phase of Judaism that became so important in his later years.”
Perhaps it was the shroud of controversy that surrounded him while he was here that led to Rabbi Schachter’s downplaying the time he spent here but, as Lewis suggested, “over time the world has forgiven him even though he left Winnipeg under a cloud”.
It was left to Alexandra Granke to fill in some of the blanks that others have found when it comes to knowing more about the time Rabbi Schacter spent here.
As Granke explained, she was “the first person to have listened to all 28 interviews about Rabbi Schachter” that Winnipeggers gave. (By the way, if you have something you’d like to tell about Rabbi Schachter, you can still get in touch with Justin Jaron Lewis, who said he would love to hear from anyone else who might have something to contribute to the oral history project. He can be reached at Justin_Lewis@umanitoba.ca .)
In analyzing Rabbi Schachter’s often controversial stay in Winnipeg, Granke observed that “there was an air of inevitability about Rabbi Schachter’s break with the Lubavitch movement.”
Granke referred to an interview given by Abe Anhang, who talked about Rabbi Schachter’s use of LSD as the reason for his departure from the Chabad movement.
“His use of LSD runs through many of the other interviews,” Granke noted. Yet, she was “surprised by the relative nonchalance of many of the interviewees” toward Rabbi Schachter’s prolific drug use.
In fact, one interviewee mentioned how she was first introduced to “weed, mescaline, and cocaine” by Rabbi Schachter.
Rather than simply dwell on this aspect of Rabbi Schachter’s life though, Granke observed that many interviewees spoke of how he “opened up his group of followers to a different understanding of Judaism.”
“Doing drugs for him was not something fun,’ Granke noted. Rather, “for him it was about a way to reach a higher level of spirituality.”
Turning to yet another oft-criticized component of his life, Granke did refer to Rabbi Schachter’s having “fathered ten children with a variety of women.”
Yet, despite his somewhat notorious reputation, Granke suggested that others “were willing to overlook his lapses in moral judgment because he was so accepting of others.”
Although Reb Zalman, as he came to be known affectionately by his devoted followers, may have “been the opposite of what was expected of rabbis in Winnipeg,” his “dedication to people” is what seems to have been the mark that he left most often upon others.
“Reb Zalman always had time for others,” was a common refrain through the interviews, Granke said.
As one interviewee suggested, Rabbi Schachter’s form of spirituality, which he formulated while he was in Winnipeg, was “Buddhist chakra meeting Jewish sphirot”.
“He was a Jewish practitioner in a universal soul,” said one interviewee.
Granke referred to the interview given by Len Udow, who suggested that the pain of Rabbi Schachter’s wartime experience (when he fled first from Vichy France, then to Belgium, where he was “one step ahead of the Gestapo”) dissipated during moments in which he was engaged in prayer. “It was as if all the pain of the war was dispelled by the sudden connection with his many ancestors.”
Murray Goldenberg mentioned Rabbi Schachter’s having taught him the blessing for marijuana: “shehakol neheyeh b’dvaro” (who brings about everything by his word).
Yet, as I noted earlier, not everyone was so rosy-hued in their memories of Rabbi Schachter. David Wilder suggested that “the reason he (Rabbi Schachter) doesn’t mention Winnipeg in his writings is because of his situation with his family. His kids didn’t speak to him,” Wilder said (because of their father’s having left their mother to take up with the daughter of a well-known Winnipeg radio announcer).
Justin Jaron Lewis did say though, that “the kids reconciled with him at the end.”
As audience members after audience member spoke up to recall their own experience of Rabbi Schachter, it was easy to understand the enormous impact that this man had on so many Winnipeggers. As Jerry Cohen said, “There was no greater influence on my life Jewishly than Reb Zalman. He was a great influence to many of us in those early years in Winnipeg.”
#1 Mr. — Ernest Seinfeld 2017-07-09 11:15
This is the first time I am reading about this rabbi. I also read an article about him today in the Jerusalem Post and made the following comment:
“I remember Rabbi Schaechter as a fellow student in Vienna at the Sperlgymnasium (high school, the same Sigmund Freud atttended) in 1937.
In Austria classes in one’s religion were mandatory.
He kept trying to upstage our religion teacher by frequent interrupting him with “Raschi said”.
The rest of the students who had no idea of the teaching of Raschi and hardly were even aware of this great Talmud scholar, after a while gave him the nickname ‘Raschi’. The teacher obviously did not enjoy these interruptions but remained quiet and polite.
Ernest Seinfeld
es893columbia.edu”
I attended three years with him in the same classes. He sat always in the first row and tried to ‘shine’. He craved for attention, a trait his fellow students did not exactly find appealing.
In our January 18, 2017 issue we also printed this letter from members of Rabbi Schachter’s family, in response to the original article:
Response to article on Reb Zalman Schachter
We are the widow and children of Reb Zalman Schachhter-Shalomi, z”l. We want to recognize the initiative of the Jewish Heritage Center in convening a public forum honoring our father and Winnipeg origins of the Jewish Renewal Movement. While none of us live in Winnipeg any longer, we treasure the time that the family had in Winnipeg and are sorry that we were unable to be present for this forum. Had we been present, we would have contributed to this retrospective in the following ways.
- The article “The late Rabbi Zalman Schachter’s Time in Winnipeg Recalled at Lively Evening Hosted by Jewish Heritage Centre” misstated the tone of his family situation. Our father was wholehearted in his relationship with his wives and children. His marriage breakdowns were certainly not caused by lapses in moral judgment. Divorce almost always is difficult for the marital partners and children. In the case of Reb Zalman and Feigle, the decision to end their marriage was understandable as, much earlier, they recognized that their relationship was unsustainable. They had drifted apart as a result of the differences in their spiritual visions and only intentionally stayed together until their youngest child reached her Bat Mitzvah so that she would have the capacity to deal with family breakdown. None of the children harbor any resentment to children from other mothers. It is a testament to Reb Zalman’s love for his children, and our love for him, the that we are all in touch with one another to share each other’s joy and provide support in times of need.
- There is an element of physical harshness in the name Schachter, which has its origins in Shochet (slaughterer). Reb Zalman was someone who was deeply concerned with the increase in violent conflict in the world. He adopted a typical Jewish response to his concerns by adding a name that would bring to our consciousness the need to pursue peace, Shalom. For many years now, he has been known and called Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
- The relatively limited material in the University of Colorado archives on Jewish Renewal on Reb Zalman’s time in Winnipeg is not based in any way on any deliberate action on his part or because of an alleged cloud causing him to leave the city. Reb Zalman moved to Philadelphia because it had a larger Jewish community and was closer to other large Jewish centers in North America. Reb Zalman had begun providing rabbinic training in Winnipeg, but few students were willing to come to Winnipeg to study. The move to the east coast enabled many more students to access his training and become rabbis. As for the gap in current literature concerning Reb Zalman’s time in Winnipeg, we applaud Professor Lewis’s initiative in collecting oral histories to be added to the archive at the University of Colorado. Regarding the claim that Reb Zalman ignored Winnipeg in his autobiography, it should be noted that 97 pages of the 186 page “My life in Jewish Renewal,” (aside from the Appendices), are devoted to years living in Winnipeg. It is crucial to note, however, that much that happened during this period took place during his numerous travels outside Winnipeg.
We are aware that some of his views and activities were challenged by some elements of the Winnipeg Jewish community. Reb Zalman, as we all are, was human. However, for those who focused their comments at the forum on his imperfections, we wonder what standard they were holding him to. On the first Shabbat of the secular year We read Parshat Va’yigash. The story of our ancestor Ya’acov is drawing to a close. Yes, Ya’acov had issues with his wives, with his children, and with neighbors in the broader community. Those flaws, however, are not the major part of his remembrance. We remember him as a Jewish ancestor whose legacy was that all Jews now are known under Ya’acov’s second name, Yisrae. We are all B’nai Yisrael.
We, his widow, his daughters and sons, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all feel that we have been blessed by being the spouse and offspring of one of the 21 century’s greatest rabbis. Each of us, in our own way, is seeking to continue the contribution to society that he has made. May our actions and the actions of Winnipeg Jewry give our father’s neshama an aliyah!
Blessings,The Widow and all the children of Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi
Eve, Miriam, Rabbi Shalom, Josef, Yale, Chana Tina, Jonathan, Lisa, Shalvi, Rabbi Shlomo Barya, Yotam & Rossi
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.”
