Published: 13 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
SINCE SHE WAS A LITTLE girl, Chen Shimoni has heard the stories of her grandfather Gamliel Keisar (Jamil Qasar), who grew up in the city of Aleppo in Syria and made aliyah to Israel when he was 14. Now, as an architecture student at the NB Haifa School of Design, she decided to do her final project on the city – after she heard a lecture by architect Aline Khoury on the Palestinian village of Suhmata in the upper Galilee, which was abandoned during the War of Independence in 1948.
“When she spoke about her grandfather I thought about my grandfather, only from the other side, on the uprooting of the Jews of Aleppo,” said Shimoni. “Through the architectural work I learned about the city and heard his stories once again while working on the project. The words turned into pictures that reflected a different reality.”
A significant portion of Aleppo’s Old City, which was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was destroyed in the Syrian civil war. Shimoni used Facebook to try to contact architecture students who live in Aleppo and sent emails to architecture firms there, but she got no response. “Given that nearly two million people in the city were uprooted, I can guess that some of those accounts aren’t active.
FULL STORY Israeli architecture student sets her sights on rebuilding Aleppo, her grandfather’s hometown (Haaretz)
Photo: An image from Chen Shimoni's project. One thing she proposes is building a factory for making construction materials out of the rubble of the houses (WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education)
