SHMA.COM
Our Homes, Our Story
LAUREN BAHARY WILNER, ADAM EILATH,
& JASON GUBERMAN-PFEFFER
Adam Eilath and Lauren
Bahary Wilner are Diarna
researchers based in
Jerusalem, where they are
recording oral histories of
Mizrahim.
Jason Guberman-Pfeffer is the
project coordinator of Diarna
and executive director of Digital
Heritage Mapping, Inc., the
project’s parent nonprofit
agency. To begin your free trip —
no passport or airfare required
— explore Diarna’s Web site,
http://www.diarna.org.
The Jewish narrative, as any other, has an evolving story line, composed of the in- terplay between history and memory.
Twenty-first-century digital mapping technol-
ogy affords a unique opportunity to enhance
our understanding of this narrative by making
thousands of Jewish heritage sites not just vis-
ible, but “visitible.”
Diarna, “Our Homes” in Judeo-Arabic, is a
project that harnesses technology, particularly
Google Earth, to provide virtual access to the
sites of our endangered Jewish heritage across
the Middle East and North Africa. In the case of
writer Lamaan Herdoon, who left Iraq in the
1970s, and dreamt of returning to Baghdad,
Diarna enables the realization (if only virtually)
of a dream long deferred:
I wish that I could fly like a bird with my
daughters and show them the home where I
grew up, my school, Frank Iny, the college I
attended, Baghdad University, Abu Nawas
Street, the Tigris River, and our synagogue….
For thousands of years, Jews lived in communities from the edge of the Sahara in
Southern Morocco to the Iranian-Afghani border. In the past few decades, and vividly illustrated recently with the flight of many members
of Yemen’s dwindling Jewish community, most
of these ancient communities have ceased to
exist in essence or in fact. But while community members have left, their former structures
and sites remain behind. Digitally mapping
these places provides insight into the lives and
stories of past and current inhabitants, as well
as a tangible mechanism for preserving and exploring memories and history.
Documenting sites in this manner also cre-
ates an image of one’s heritage not wholly
available through text, photos, or stories alone.
For Lauren, Diarna enlivens her mother’s roots
in a country she couldn’t imagine visiting now,
the Islamic Republic in Iran. “I have studied
Farsi; I have attempted Persian cooking; and I
wear my great-grandmother’s jewelry to try to
connect with my identity. But when will it be
safe for me to visit the neighborhood where my
grandparents met? Now I have a virtual pass-
port to experience the sweep of 2,700 years of
Jewish life in Iran.”
Until recently, there existed very limited ge-
ographic documentation, in either scholarly or
popular works, on the physical parameters of
Mizrahi communities. However, today, Google
Earth makes available a freely downloadable
program that supplies interactive satellite im-
agery of the entire globe to an audience in ex-
cess of 500 million users.
On our Web site, we weave and synthesize
satellite imagery (complete with terrain,
zoomable perspectives, tiltable views, and
360-degree rotation), archival and contemporary photos and videos, audio- and video-oral
histories, panoramas, and even three-dimensional models, to create compelling entry
points to these once vibrant, yet largely forgotten communities. Anyone with an Internet
connection can travel across the region as if
on eagles’ wings, unaffected by the political
and interreligious strife on the ground, which
often thwarts physically preserving, and even
(in too many cases) simply visiting these sites.
Over time, these sites are physically disappearing. And they are at risk of being forever lost
both to history and memory as the last generation with personal memories passes on. This reality, as well as the dearth of information on, and
accessibility to, Mizrahi heritage sites has left us
(in a sense) as orphans, disconnected from an
essential aspect of our identity. The story of who
we are, individually and as a people, is rooted in
the Middle East’s soil. One of our researchers,
Adam, whose mother’s family is from the rural
village of Nabeul, Tunisia, yearned to discover
Rather than asking what makes a story Jewish, we should ask how our stories make us Jews. Telling any story is a basic way to make sense of the flow of events in our own lives. Hearing or reading a story presents us with a way to frame our own lives or the lives of others. To the extent hat we tell and retell, engage or contest ales of slavery, freedom, covenant, exile, or redemption, we write ourselves into the Jewish narrative. We become the stories we tell. Chava Weissler is Philip and Muriel Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University.
