Musrara Collection, Visual Research Center and website

What does it mean to grow up in a place where population density isn’t measured only by counting the number of persons per room but also by the number of persons who share a bed? Musrara, a poor neighborhood on the borderline between east and west Jerusalem, is the birthplace of the Israeli “Black Panthers” movement. The Musrara Collection is a social-documentary project that incorporates the life stories, the photographs, the voices and films of the neighborhood’s residents, alongside formal documents. The materials collected depict the story of an Israeli microcosm, a society made of immigrants with many identities. The website presents stories of families, recorded interviews and personal photographs from family albums that join the historical documentation and become a part of the national ethos and the visual culture of Israel. The musrara collection was awarded the Zionist creation award from the Israeli ministry of culture in 2012. The project is a pilot and plans to be extended to other communities in Israel. It is a basis of visual content for contemporary exhibitions that correspond with archival materials.