Press Bulletins and News Stories

Canadian photographer Orah Buck’s Babatha’s Story will open its 22 colour photographs exhibition Sunday, September 3rd at 12:00 P.M. at the Instituto Cultural Mexico–Israel A.C., Republica de el Salvador #41 in the Historic Centre of Mexico City.

Babatha’s Story tell us the history of a young Jewish woman who lived in Petra, Jordan around 132 C.E. at the time of Roman domination and the uprising of Bar Kokhba. This exhibition is based on ancient scrolls found at the Ein Gedi Valley in 1961 by Israel archaeologist Yigael Yadin. The Israel Exploration Society together with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and The Shrine of The Book published the find in The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in The Cave of the Letters by Naphtali Lewis.

Orah Buck is a well-known Canadian photographer who has presented exhibitions in Canada, United States of America, Israel and now in Mexico. More than ten galleries around the world show Orah’s interest in nature and people. Beside this, we note several exhibitions based on Judaism and Jewish migration from different points of view.

The Instituto Cultural Mexico-Israel A.C. is honored to present this exhibition as part of its promotion of friendship and the strengthening of bonds between people.
The exhibition will be open until October 18th .
Admission is Free.

For further information please contact: instituto@mexico-israel.org
Phone: 57098812 or 57098853.

The photographic show that reveals the perseverance of the Jewish people

Notimex
El Universal
Mexico
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006

4:27 PM.
The history of a Jewish woman whose life in the old city of Petra, Jordan shows, after two thousand years, an example of the perseverance and hope of the Israeli people.
This is the spinal cord of the exhibition of Babatha’s Story, by Canadian photographer Orah Buck, which opened today at the Cultural Institute Mexico-Israel.

A total of 22 images of standard format, full color, showing corners, roads, fields and majestic constructions out of stone, are part of the exhibition majestically displaying a world where young Babatha lived under Roman domination.

Open until October 18th, the exhibition is based on archaeological findings carried out at Ein Gedi’s Valley in 1961 by the prominent Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin. This story is about the original ancient documents written by a young Jewish woman and discovered in a crack in the cave wall where she escaped to hide out from the Roman advance and to protect herself and her son from Roman power.

Babatha’s history, as Orah Buck told us in the opening, is an example of the tradition of the strongest Jewish women heroines who combine courage, fortitude, intelligence and strength and whose lives could be understood as similar to those of contemporary women. Babatha’s comforts, pleasures, hardships, fights and sorrows are shared and understood by many Jewish women in today’s life.

She was born in Maoza , a small town south of Petra. Babatha was orphaned at a very young age. She then inherited significant and abundant date fields that belonged to her father. When she was still a teenager she married Yeshu’a; from this union her only child Joshua was born.

When her husband died in spite of the burden of looking after the family business she carried the weight of being under the patriarchy that existed at that time: trying to protect, at any cost to herself, the right she had, by law, to hold and look after the fortune of her young son. As years past Babatha fell in love with Judah, a much older man than her with a wife and a daughter.

A year after she married Judah, Babatha became a widow again. Then she had to fight in court against her husband’s first wife. Later she was running away to escape the Romans. She hid in the Cave of the Letters at Ein Gedi with many other Jewish people. Her court documents were found there by Israeli archaeologist Yigal Yadin.

More than two thousand years ago, added Buck, the city where Babatha lived “had begun as a temporary refugee for nomadic Nabataeans. It became a thriving centre with numerous profitable businesses. Caravans found it to be a perfect location because it was an earthly union between Africa and Asia. It was easy to defend and protect with its surrounding mountains and caves. The Nabataeans built Petra into a fortress, a walled capital city.

Attracted by the majesty of Petra and with the model history of Babatha, the photographer discovers with her camera the ruins of that city where her heroine loved, prospered, suffered and lived the history that she left in the found written scrolls and documents.

Jenni Serur, vice president of the Cultural Institute Mexico-Israel, stressed that through a devoted and hard process of research and an aesthetic sense, Orah Buck “takes us to Babatha’s soul, giving the voice back to a woman who, in spite of her youth, her orphaned status, her having been widowed twice and her own female condition in a man’s world, she dared prevail over the conditions of her time in history”.

With her history, she added, Babatha “keeps the spirit alive of survival, that has been with the Jewish people from the origins and not only that but she and Orah also remind us: in order to reach for peace it is necessary to defend truth and justice every day of our lives”.

Orah Buck it’s a well-known Canadian photographer who also exhibits in her country, The United States of America and Israel. She is very pleased to open Babatha’s Story, a colour photograph exhibition in Mexico City.