Going, Going, Gone

Every few years, once its warehouses of unclaimed lost-and-found items fill up, the Israeli police becomes Sotheby’s for a day. Back in November 2021, Adina Karpuj attended an unusual auction, but came home with none of the hundreds of “kosher” cell-phones, shtreimels, battery-less electric bikes or industrial ovens(!) that were up for grabs.

No matter who we are, where we live, or what religion we practice, there are ceremonies and rituals that accompany us from birth to death (and, in some cases, beyond). Many of these rites of passage are a source of much joy and anticipation, but some – such as the one Tanya Huyard observed at Jerusalem’s “pacifier tree” – elicit more ambivalent feelings.

On the afternoon of August 15, 2021, the hills of Jerusalem were covered in smoke. It was, it would turn out after the fire was quelled five days later, one of the most devastating wildfires in Israel’s recent history. Roughly 14,000 dunams of forest had turned to ash, and so too had Micha and Shoshanna Harrari’s wooden harp workshop in Ramat Raziel. A month after the blaze, Elie Bleier went to meet them, and heard how this hippie couple plans to cope with their loss.

At the very end of Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, right before the city spills into the Mediterranean Sea, there’s a hole-in-the-wall store called Photo Doron. It’s a repair shop for film cameras – one of the last of its kind, like a fossil of a different era. Skyler Inman stepped in and discovered why – though his profession is closer to appearing in history books than in newspaper headlines – 79-year-old Ya’akov Barzilai isn’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon.

Shlomo and Sarah Adani were married for longer than most people are alive. They grew up together in the small village of Dalah in Yemen, and were practically inseparable for more than eight decades. Renana Adani, their granddaughter, told Yoshi Fields about a partnership that began before the invention of color TV, atomic energy and super glue, and ended – in Jerusalem – within the span of 48 hours.