Forsaken Me?

Benyamin Reich’s exhibition is the fruit of his wanderings through the realms of his childhood in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem. It displays a collection of documentary photographs, childhood photographs, family photographs, and anonymous photographs. With a sense of yearning, the adult Reich returns as a suitor to these regions, documenting this world of others with his camera. Childhood becomes the object of desire and its photographic representation is testimony to possible ideal perfection.

In the documentary photographs there are depictions of boys-youths, surrounded by the idyll, looking straight at the viewer. The images provide a feeling of a perfect, protecting social framework, which reveals the gaze of Reich-the photographer looking at the childhoods of others as a protected place, wrapped in peace and calm.

In the childhood photographs Reich is himself depicted as a child who does not feel complete, belonging or protected. In one of the images he appears as a young boy in festive clothing, smiling and ready to be photographed. His forced smile gives away his sense of not belonging to the place or situation. The element of strangeness is a thread woven through the photographs; it is possible to identify the sense of otherness coming to the surface along with the expressed effort to belong.

Placing the childhood photographs alongside the documentary photographs confronts the personal and the collective experience. The past placed next to the present exposes the fracture of childhood, the sense of disconnection and the search for individuality that characterizes Reich’s work.

“Hast Thou Forsaken Me?” Is taken from the verse “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalms 22:1). The question reveals the sadness and astonishment rising from an unrealized promise for a childhood that is safe and protected in the shade of the Torah and faith.

Lea Golda Holterman