Almost every year on the same Hebrew date – Purim, the day when the law is deferred and the mind is negated to create a simulation of a reversal by means of costumes and masks – [Pavel Wolberg] sets out on his own initiative on a photographic hunting campaign in El Khalil/Hebron, to photograph the Purim celebration there, among “them”. In recent years, Wolberg recounts, the demonstrations of ritualized joy in the form of the Ad-lo-yada processions through the forcibly deserted streets of Old Hebron, which were at their peak especially during the years of the Second Intifada (September 2000 – Spring-Summer 2005), have gradually subsided – and concurrently there has also been a decrease in his Purim photographs, which grafted together reveling settlers with soldiers and border guards protecting them. 

Moshe Ninio.