| A Gift Passed Along |

Still Wrapped in Happiness

By Miki Spitzer | April 5, 2020

My photo of the tallis in Dubai made waves across the Arab-language media

Photo: Miki Spitzer

There’s something about the tallis that has always pulled at me. That image of a Jew wrapped in a flimsy covering that shuts out the noise of This World and connects him to his Creator and inner core seems, to me at least, to be one of the most evocative and powerful symbols of Judaism.

As a landscape photographer, I do a lot of traveling, and I’ve captured exotic and colorful scenes from across the globe. During those travels, the tallis image kept playing at the edge of my consciousness. Then finally, I had an idea: to create a series of photos of a tallis-wrapped Jew in a variety of locations, and eventually to display them as a collection.

My photo of the tallis in Dubai made waves across the Arab-language media. I also managed an interesting photo of a tallis in Iceland. And as a resident of Israel, I was able to capture a tallis against the holy background of Eretz Yisrael as well.

But I’ve gotten the most emotional feedback to my photo of the tallis in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz is part of my family history. My grandparents are Hungarian and Austrian survivors, and a great-grandfather of mine was killed there. One of my grandfathers is actually a history professor, but even my grandmother, who doesn’t talk about history for a living, shares a lot of her war memories. So when I had an opportunity to visit Poland, I decided I’d go to Auschwitz as well.

I set up my equipment for this photo almost two full hours beforehand. I knew what kind of light I wanted — the vivid colors in this photo are all natural — and I knew exactly which moments would give me the drama I was looking for. Once I had everything set up, I was able to take the time to reflect on just where I was and what I was doing.

Imagine if a Jew would have walked across this blood-soaked ground in his tallis 70 years ago, I thought. Imagine what his end would have been. And imagine what the Nazis probably thought to themselves. They were planning to obliterate every tallis, every pair of tefillin, every siddur — every trace of the Jew. Yet here we are today, still wrapping ourselves in that holy garment that separates us from the angst and insecurity of this fractured world and allows us to focus on eternity.

My grandparents were so moved when I showed them the photo. But it resonated with irreligious Jews too. “Wow, look at that, a tallis in Auschwitz, a Jew praying where they tried to kill us,” they told me when they saw it. “Am Yisrael chai.”

(Originally featured in A Gift Passed Along, Special Supplement: Pesach 5780)

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