CHARVONAH’S PHOTOGRAPHS show no faces, for obvious reasons. If the authorities were to identify the people, they would be interrogated under torture in order to trace him. His photographs therefore linger on hands resting on velvet cloth, on reflections in a glass lamp, on the texture of wood smoothed by generations of visitors. In one image, a thin layer of dust drifts in the corner of the hall. Even through the screen, a faint smell of old bricks and candle smoke seems to rise.
Every few years, the tomb returns to the headlines, but not because of prayer. In 2011, student demonstrations demanded that the site be stripped of its official status. On the protest signs appeared the number 77,000, taken from the Book of Esther: “And the rest of the Jews who were in the king’s provinces assembled and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of them that hated them seventy and five thousand.”
