Nehalel is a complete, strictly traditional siddur in which photographs depicting central meanings of the texts direct your attention to what prayers are about.

With this use of photographs, Nehalel makes us powerfully aware of the themes that intersect in the Siddur. The liturgy celebrates the Creator of our spectacular environment — the cosmic, earthly and Eretz-Yisraeli, the universal human environment as well as the national. It speaks our thanks for the gift of our lives within these; and through it we plead for personal, national and human welfare. Repeatedly, the Siddur recounts the catastrophes in our history, of destruction and exile, and then turns to our redemptions — the pattern intensely realized during the last century; and on almost every page we point to Jerusalem as the central symbol of the complete redemption we yearn for.

The images in Nehalel reflect these different themes. The photos are partly contemporary and partly historical; partly of the natural order, partly of human reality; partly from Eretz Yisrael, partly from a much wider panorama. Many are drawn from various archives — some documenting the dark times in Europe, others showing the triumphs of modern Zionism.

The result is a work that makes the themes of the liturgy conspicuous to us as we pray — with a force that possibly no siddur has achieved ever before.