Home for a day: Palestinian diaspora reconnects with motherland
A project run by Ziad Bakri in Palestine aims to reconnect Palestinians in the diaspora with their family's history by visiting the homes their relatives left in 1948.
Maher Shamma, who was born in Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus and grew up in the United States, has held onto a map of his family house in Acre, a historical port city in northern Israel, that his uncle drew in 1948. To Shamma, the map is a symbol of his roots and his homeland.
It was this map that enabled Shamma, 57, to visit his family’s home this summer, with the help of a project called We Were and We Are Still. Tarek Bakri, a 31-year-old researcher from Jerusalem, has reconnected dozens of Palestinians abroad with their towns and villages of origin and with their family homes.
Once he received Shamma’s map, Bakri researched the Acre maps from the British Mandate and compared them to Shamma’s hand-drawn map in search of the house. Despite never having visited Acre, Shamma seemed to know the roads like the back of his hand. Over the years, his uncle, who had left Acre at the age of 26, had described the town and the neighborhood, and the house that was surrounded by 24 cypress trees.
During his visit to the house, which once belonged to his grandfather, a Palestinian woman approached Shamma and told him that only one family with the last name of Shamma had remained in Acre after 1948. Shamma took their address and visited them before returning to the United States, carrying with him sweet memories of his family’s old home, now a nursery run by the Israeli Ministry of Education, and newfound distant relatives.
