To really get to know a place, skip the touristy market with its souvenir stalls and go to the real one – the one with a perpetually dirty floor, where the smell of fish at one stall bleeds into the spices at the next, and where only grandmothers shopping for dinner know how to create real urgency in a crowd. The heart of any living city isn’t its theater or art museum, and it isn’t the beach or the river – it’s the steaming bustle of the market. That’s where you meet a culture stripped bare, absorbed in its own daily life. The market is where abundance and restraint collide: a place that takes pride in being cheap, accessible, fresh, and unpretentious.
Wherever you go, the market teaches you what people actually eat, what's in season, what a local really means when they say “I had a salad.” It’s less a place to shop than a way to read a city.
The face of Jerusalemites
In recent years, Mahane Yehuda has grown so popular that crossing it end to end on a Thursday night is nearly impossible. And yet, despite the boom in restaurants and bars, it somehow holds onto its soul – a market that is the face of Jerusalemites. From the vendors at their stalls, to the smell of fish, to the constant turnover of figs, pomegranates, watermelons, and cherries in season, to olive and seed tastings whose pits and shells litter the floor, to the piles of vegetables in the Iraqi section.
Mahane Yehuda is one of Israel’s oldest markets, dating back to the end of the Ottoman period. And it has held onto what a market, at its simplest, is supposed to be: the place you go for fresh produce at a fair price, where haggling is still an option. It has never lost its vitality – it remains an urban center impossible to ignore.
Can a tourist really say they visited Jerusalem without setting foot in Mahane Yehuda? What is Jerusalem without the huge piles of gummy candy by the entrance, without the smell of kanafeh and the halva stalls, without ageless women hawking tomatoes and artichokes at prices you can’t quite trust, without grandmothers pushing carts ahead of them? There’s no Jerusalem without a delusional Messiah begging in the open market, without young men pushing shots on you at any hour, without home-style restaurants, without peddlers shouting about their pitas and strawberries and passing gossip from stall to stall.
Auerbach’s lens
Aliza Auerbach’s photographs were taken back when Mahane Yehuda was still mainly a local commercial space, long before it became a hub for nightlife and tourism. They document vendors, shoppers, and craftspeople going about their day – and in doing so, preserve a specific moment in Jerusalem’s history: a poorer, denser city not yet reshaped by leisure culture. But Auerbach isn’t interested in the market purely as an institution or a commercial space. Her photographs capture the beautiful duality of every market visit: on the one hand, congestion, abundance, color – even in black and white – and on the other, a cast of fascinating individuals she pauses to observe. Auerbach shows us that the crowd breaks down into hundreds of small stories, that all the noise is really a collection of private, delicate moments. Right in the busiest corner of the city, she chooses a humanist gaze – zeroing in on one vendor, one buyer, trying to tell their story, silencing the crowd’s background noise to meet, within the market, a single person: the Israeliness, the Jerusalem-ness, the people of the market.
The recurring motif is isolation – a single figure pulled out from the whole, someone who caught the photographer’s eye. The entire frame builds around that figure; the movement of the crowd and the formal composition organize themselves around them, almost always framed by some shape that draws the eye in.
The individual in black and white
These figures are shown with real compassion. Even a loud, brash vendor is caught in a quiet, thoughtful moment – a few seconds spent gathering fruit, arranging it, revealing an unexpected tenderness for the work. A completely anonymous woman is caught unaware, but never intrusively – always through a gaze that’s warm and human.
Black-and-white does real work here too. There’s a sharp eye for the contrasts within each frame: a pale shirt setting off a woman’s face, a black hat throwing a face into relief, a white shirt against a backdrop of fish. Stripped of color, the figures separate from their surroundings – nothing distracts, and the eye goes straight to the person.
In the end, that’s what Auerbach’s Mahane Yehuda gives us: not the market as spectacle, but the market as a thousand private lives, caught mid-gesture. The stalls, the shouting, the smell of fish and spice – all of it fades, and what’s left is a face. Maybe that’s the real reason to go to the market in the first place.
This article was originally published in Hebrew.
Main Photo: Aliza Auerbach