This image I took in Venice, Italy on my way to put on Tefillin with Chabad located in the area called “Ghetto of Venice”.

Just before Shabbat.

I keep finding new images that relate to my ongoing project The 36 Unknown.

They arrive at times of great peril. Finding their images in Kracow, Auschwitz, Germany and elsewhere, I continued my search for wholeness. Once again, I was forced to examine my life as a Jewish man at the end of the twentieth century as well as the tolls of history, both communal and personal, on our society at large.

My “Thirty-Six Unknown” brought personal healing. From a pilgrimage starting in 1983 in Washington, D.C. through the Jewish renaissance in Germany and working with Holocaust victims as well as visiting the camps, I moved from sharing the horror to recovering from it.

“The Thirty Six Unknown” was my attempt to restore and update the rich Jewish lore and to help deepen the context of a renewed society.

Rav Venice. Photograph by © Todd Weinstein

Todd Weinstein is an internationally acclaimed photographer living in New York, he can be emailed at: ionruach at gmail.com.