Exhibitions

Be’eriMicha BrikmanAt dawn on Shabbat, 7th October 2023 – the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah – reality outside the Gaza Strip and in all Israel changed dramatically. Terrorists of the murderous Hamas organization breached the border fence and began a conquest of the Israeli

The exhibition presents some of the personas assumed by Peter. They are offered for viewers to choose, as masks that will either hide them or set them free. We do not have to choose one mask only. We may change masks and metamorphose whenever we want, whether through a physical or a virtual mask.

Maja Gratzfeld came from Germany to Israel as part of a student exchange program with the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. In Jerusalem she met her partner, and together they decided to start a family in Haifa. During the COVID-19 period, Gratzfeld found herself with a newborn baby, in a new country, struggling to get by in a foreign language. With movement restricted to a 500-meter radius of her home under the lockdown regulations, in a nearby park she met a few elderly women, nannies aged fifty to seventy who make their livings taking care of other people's children, and they became her community. It was no coincidence that Gratzfeld met them in a public park in Haifa's Carmel area, whose population is typically of a high socio-economic ranking that can afford such service.

Curator: Yifat Ashkenazi

The clusters of abandoned-sealed and ruined buildings are like monuments in the urban landscape – reminders of historical turning points in Haifa's narrative. The city is a collection of buildings with a story, a puzzle of textures that allow for a complex reading of its history and the forces that shaped its unique form.
The book and the exhibition Lower Haifa trace a complex urban portrait at a specific point in time. This collection of photographs raises questions regarding the city, its history, its politics, and its future. The layer revealed to us in the photographs will also eventually come to be covered by another layer and will be transformed over the years.

Mike Brant is still considered one of the most successful Israeli singers of all time, and an international Israeli legend. In his short career abroad, he recorded dozens of songs that conquered the hit parades, was featured on the front covers of hundreds of magazines, and performed for tens of thousands of fans.
Although Brant’s international career flourished, in Israel he sank initially between Arik Einstein and Yigal Bashan, between Sipurei Poogy of the Kaveret group and Sof Onat Hatapuzim of the Tammuz rock band. He never made it into the canon of Israeli music and entertainment. That said, there has never been an Israeli singer, either before or since Brant, who has attracted as much adulation after his death. Almost five decades since his tragic demise, his albums and songs continue to be sold in large numbers, both in Israel and abroad. Ultimately, in the local context, he can be said to have secured his place in the pantheon of Israeli music.

This exhibition marks three decades since that major wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union. The influx made a decisive impact on Israel, not only in terms of its sheer numbers, but in the distinct culture and outlook that the new immigrants brought with them. Although they settled throughout the country, the city of Haifa stood out because of the size of the community that made its home there. Its presence began to be felt throughout the city, on Russian-language signs, in shops, a variety of workplaces, and more. The new immigrants were able to preserve their old culture and traditions almost entirely, while at the same time acclimating to their new country. They rebuilt their lives in Israel – and within it, Haifa – achieving in essence their own private perestroika.

The history of Haifa's gay community is long and fascinating, yet despite its importance on both the local and national level, it has largely remained concealed. In the study of queer history in Israel, as a field addressing the plight of sexual and gender minorities, it is the history of Tel Aviv that has most often been documented; Tel Aviv also figures prominently in the collective memory of the local gay community. The chronology of the gay struggle in Israel, including films on this subject, tends to tell a Tel-Avivian tale, with occasional flickers of Jerusalem.

In honor of the CZA's centennial, a number of exhibitions in museums throughout Israel will present materials kept in the archives. The Haifa City Museum has chosen to focus on the collection of Haifa posters and broadsides preserved in the archives. The collection affords an opportunity to learn about daily life in Haifa, about the different ideologies that characterized different periods in the life of the city, and about local graphic designers and printing houses.

The exhibition A Black Flag in a Red City illuminates a chapter in the history of Haifa's Wadi Salib neighborhood, the social implications of which are absent from most of the urban and national "spaces of memory." The exhibition focuses on the voices of the residents of Wadi Salib in the second half of the twentieth century, reflecting a personal and collective memory of urban history written "from below." Using exclusively visual means, the exhibition presents experiences of marginality, injustice, and exclusion, alongside the development of a diverse and lively social fabric. This reality fostered processes of social organization and resistance, climaxing in the protests of July 1959.

In the 1950s, a number of professional photographers were active in Haifa. Some worked for local institutions and government bodies. Amiram Erev (the “Solel Boneh Photography Studio”) and Moshe Gross (the “Keren Or” studio), for example, documented the period’s bustling industries and massive surge of construction. Alongside Arav and Gross, photographers passing through the city — such as Boris Carmi and Zoltan Kruger — commemorated its unique views.