TEMPORARY PERMIT for PERMANENT STAY

This artist book is a stopover on a long journey into the community of asylum seekers in Israel and a young Eritrean family in south Tel Aviv.
Angesom, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, came to Israel in 2008 after a nine-month journey. He fled Eritrea to Ethiopia, where he stayed in a refugee camp for about three months, and after a first attempt, which nearly ended in his drowning in the river, he managed to cross the border with Sudan, entered the Sinai Peninsula, and from there to Israel. A year later, his brother tried to flee along the same route but was killed in transit. The brother’s picture hangs in a central place in the room, inside a sheet protector, with a wooden cross next to it.
Tirhas, also an asylum seeker from Eritrea, came to Israel in a similar way, about a year after Angesom. She is one of eight siblings; two of her brothers were killed in the war with Ethiopia. During her high-risk pregnancy with her twin girls, she stopped working as a chambermaid in a hotel and stayed home. During that time, she collected photos of celebrities from magazines and hung them on one of the walls in the family’s tiny one-bedroom apartment.
Angesom works as a dishwasher in a restaurant, and Tirhas cleans houses. They have three children.