Special project:
Ghosts of War

One of Shifra's greatest passions is photographing ruins.

On a wintry day in February 2010, Shifra went out to photograph in the northern Golan Heights. The place she chose – an abandoned, desolate area, saturated with silent traces of past wars – was also the site of a fierce battle during the Yom Kippur War. The path led her to the ruins of the famous Syrian headquarters. There, as she wandered and photographed among destroyed rooms, broken walls, staircases that led nowhere, graffiti on soot-covered, shell-pierced walls – she felt that this was no ordinary ruin she had chosen to photograph, but a deeply personal and emotionally charged encounter with her past.

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In 1948, Shifra’s brother, Eliyahu Rabinovich (of blessed memory), fell in Israel’s War of Independence, when she was only 12 years old. Decades later, as she gazed through the camera lens at the ruins, surrounded by silence and crumbling walls – she heard him whisper in her ear:
"Shifra, this is war."

That moment gave birth to the photographic series before us – a series in which the ruins are presented as they are, and as they are reflected in her soul. One place, two perspectives: one – physical, documented through the camera; the other – internal, alive, which she named 'Ghosts of War'. 
Thus, the ruins of the Golan Heights become not only a testimony to the collapse of buildings, but also a testimony to a personal voice that rises from within the destruction – and continues to whisper.