Zochrot
Ben Tzvi 2 P.O.B 8412،
Tel Aviv - Yaffa 6818164
Israel
Contact person: Eitan Bronstein
+972 3 695 3155
+972 3 695 3154
zochrot@zochrot.org
http://www.zochrot.org
Topics
- Educational policy/project
- Peace politics
About us
Zochrot is an Israeli-Jewish non-profit organization founded in 2002. Based in Tel Aviv, its aim is to promote awareness of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe"), the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Its goal is to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, to enable a place for the Nakba in the language and in the environment. This is in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory. The Nakba is the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture.
Zochrot was founded in early 2002 and its main goal is to bring knowledge of the Palestinian Nakba to Jewish-Israeli people. One of the basic assumptions of our work is that the Nakba is the ‘ground zero’ of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Awareness and recognition of the Nakba by Jewish-Israeli people, and taking responsibility for this tragedy, are essential to ending the struggle and starting a process of reconciliation between the people of Palestine-Israel.
Zochrot acts in many ways to advance this goal:
• Organization of tours for Jews and Arabs to Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. During these tours we post signs that commemorate the different sites in the destroyed villages and give more details about each of them. It is through these stories that participants can get an idea of what the village actually looked like, and what it was like to live in it. The event is also important in establishing the historical/collective memory of the land.
• Production of a special booklet, in Hebrew and Arabic, for each tour. These booklets reflect Zochrot’s process of learning. They feature testimonies by refugees, photographs of the village, and historical background from different sources.
• It is Zochrot’s ambition to recreate the Nakba in Hebrew — in other words, to enable a space where the Nakba can be spoken of or written about in the Hebrew language. For this purpose, a website was created that includes a database of all the Palestinian villages that were destroyed since 1948 and the names of the Israeli localities that were built on their lands. There are also specific maps of the destroyed villages and different details about each of them.
• Hosting workshops and lectures with different groups of students, teachers, social activists, and so on, who want to learn about the Nakba.
• Zochrot carries out workshops and conferences in which Israelis and Palestinians are invited to examine our spaces and plan them anew.
Educational programs:
• Study Guide about the Nakba that contains lesson plans and educational materials for formal and informal educational systems
• Learning groups about the Nakba for people of all backgrounds, in a setting that combines knowledge about the Nakba and critical thinking.
• Teacher Training: Courses and seminars invite teachers to engage in a critical educational process using Zochrot's Study Guide on the Nakba.
• Workshops and Lectures: By-invitation workshops and lectures for teachers and organizations, facilitated by the educational staff of Zochrot.
Zochrot supports the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their country. Return is fundamental to resolving the conflict and implementation of return need not cause injustice to Jewish people who live in Israel. Return does not mean expelling Jews from their homes, but the very opposite: The mutual existence of Palestinians and Jews in the country.
Eitan Bronstein is one of Zochrot’s founders and the Public Relations Coordinator.
For other net participants we can offer an expert guidance through trained staff, give an expert opinion, procure expert information and establish new contacts in the field of our work.