Childhood

The photographs shown here portray scenes of childhood and adolescence in Israel today, adding another dimension to the Jewish traditional rites of passage displayed in the "Rhythm of Life" Gallery of The Jewish Art and Life Wing.

In recent years, the Israeli photographer Pavel Wolberg (born in Leningrad in 1966) has traveled throughout the country, capturing with the critical lens of his camera children and teenagers from the center and the periphery. With a penetrating eye he focuses on political conflicts as well as on events in the margins of public discourse. His works emphasize the local aspects of childhood – leisure time in a community center or a shopping mall and life in the shelters near the border – as well as its universal traits:  curiosity, playfulness, and the urge to imitate grown-ups. Altogether, they add up to a chronicle of a reality that sometimes looks more like fiction.

Presented in the framework of traditions practiced by Jewish communities around the world – where ceremonies have a clearly demarcated time-frame and a predetermined content – childhood in Israel appears multifaceted and prolonged, and the borderline between childhood and adulthood seems to have become blurred.

Safed, 2003, Digital print, Collection of the artist