an Ultra-orthodox family

In 1988, during the week long sukkot Jewish festival, I met for the first time with Arie and two of his sons, Yosef Haim (8) and hilel (5) at the Western wall. I was taking pictures, we got to talk and became friends. from then on, I visited them regularly in their home and decided to photograph them as a way of documenting their family and community life.

Arie and his wife Galit came from a secular background, they had married and lived a totally secular life in Holon, a populous suburb of Tel Aviv. A few years before I met them they decided together to come back to the Jewish faith. They moved to Jerusalem and joined the "Shuvu Banim" community, a subsect of the Bratslav Hasidic dynasty. Eliezer Berland was the rather dubious and controversial religious leader of the "Shuvu Banim" community and already back then, many of Berland's followers had burnished reputation for lawlessness and violence.

Arie and Galit already had 6 children when I first met them. The family was living in accordance to the strict rules of Hasidic Judaism, yet the "Shuvu Banim" community was not part of the Hasidic mainstream communities in Jerusalem. In many ways, they were being marginalized. One reason was that the vast majority of its members had come back to the faith, born and raised in secular Israel. This is why I could visit them in their home. Unfortunately, after some months, Berland's closest followers became suspicious of me and I was "advised" in a rather unfriendly way to "keep my distance"...​

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Here is a series of photographs from the period during which I could freely visit Arie and Galit. I decided to focus on 5 years old Hilel, one of their sons, who was just about to join the community's education system.