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Jan. 16, 2021
For her 15th birthday, in 1951, Amalia Tolchinsky received a not so exciting present from her father: a certificate affirming that 10 trees had been planted in her honor by the Jewish National Fund in Israel. So disappointed was she that completely forgot about the gift. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, she was very far, physically, from the JNF pine saplings in the young Jewish state, and the truth is they didn’t really interest her very much. In fact, in the 70 years since that donation was made – even after she immigrated to Israel, where she has lived since the 1970s – she never looked for the trees that were planted in her honor. But for her son, photographer Miki Kratsman, the very existence of those trees constitutes something akin to a seminal event. They are the point of departure for a project that is related to a larger theme that has engaged him for most of his professional life: the dispossession, erasure and repression of the Palestinian pas