Ahead of the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur in Hebrew, orthodox and religious Jews performed their traditional rituals, which they believe replaced the biblical ones at the Temples, including the waving of chickens over their heads or emptying their pockets into a stream of water, which they believe would provide them atonement for their sins. The waving of a chicken over their heads is called ‘Kapparot’, in which orthodox Jews believe the act would pass their sins onto the animal. Itzhak Endavid, an ultra-orthodox Jewish worshiper said, “What we do is called Kapparot, why we do it is because we’ve sinned and because we’ve sinned, we give over our sins to the chickens and we slaughter the chickens and they go to poor people to tell us that what happened to the chickens, they slaughtered, should really happen to us, we should be slaughtered but we give it over to the chickens and we know then to repent,” he explained.
In Tel Aviv, some orthodox Jews performed a ceremony called ‘Tashlich’, where people empty their pockets into a running source of water, symbolically casting their sins out to the sea.