São Paulo – The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is digitalizing more than 500,000 historic pictures that show the life of refugees after the Israeli occupation over 60 years ago. The project gave origin to the exhibit The Long Journey, which is taking place in Jerusalem until the end of the month, and will be taken to many countries.
The UNRWA files to be digitalized include 10,000 printed pictures, 430,000 negatives and 85,000 slides, as well as 75 films and 730 videocassette tapes. The registers were made by the agency’s photographers and show scenes of how Palestinians had to leave their homes in 1948, the establishment of refugee camps in the 1950s, the second flow of refugees during the 1967 war, the war in Lebanon and the conflicts of the second half of the 1980s up until the beginning of this century.
There are two groups working on the preservation of pictures and videos, in Amman, Jordan, and in the Gaza Strip. The project is financed in part by the private sector in Palestine, but also counts on the support of the Danish and French governments.
The importance of the images preserved by the UNRWA was acknowledged in 2009, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) put down the agency’s files for the Memory of the World Register, which includes documents of great cultural and historical relevance.
The Long Journey exhibit, which started last November at the Al-Ma’mel Center, in the old city of Jerusalem, shall also tour the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. According to the UNRWA, the aim is that Palestinians are the first to see the images, since they are part of their history. Later, the exhibit should then be taken to other countries in Europe and North America. There are also plans for it to come to Brazil.
The UNRWA launched a website to promote the project, where there are 1948 images available, from the beginning of the occupation to current days. The link for the website is http://archive.unrwa.org.
*Translated by Silvia Lindsey
