Volunteers across Palestine are donating photographs to a museum archive that aims to document the personal histories of the region. The Family Album project has been launched by the Palestinian Museum, a new institution that is scheduled to open next May in Birzeit, north of Jerusalem, in Israel. More than 6,000 images have been collected and digitised so far. “The photographs show what life was like in the early 20th century and the freedom of movement between different cities and towns back then,” says Rana Anani, a project manager at the museum.
One image, taken in the early 1950s, shows Adil Azar holding up a photograph of her son Salim, who was killed in Gaza in 1948 after the Israeli bombing of the Dar Islim printing press in Jaffa. “Adil’s grief for her son never left her: for years, she held the photograph next to her chest wherever she went,” a spokesperson for the museum says. The museum’s staff hope that Palestinians in the diaspora will use the resource to connect with relatives back home.