What happened and what could have happened - between history and dreams. Lieberman House in Nahariyah in Beno Lieberman’s letters.

The Museum of the History of Nahariyah has run a communal and educational experiment dealing with the relationship between schooling, museums and generations, designing a website that tells the story of Nahariyah’s community. The museum itself is placed in The Lieberman House, which stands on 21 G`dud Street in the southern part of the city. The interior displays artifacts that document the building of the city until the present day.

Yet the house itself also hides a story of one Jewish family from east of Poland (today’s Ukraine), which purchased it during the Interwar period when the area was ruled by the British. The presentation will deal with the history of the property and its first Jewish residents, the reality of their life in the forties and fifties. It will also present the alternative story related to the building, which did not happen but is preserved in the dreams described in letters. Beno Lieberman in his letters to Stanisław Vincenz wrote, among other issues, about his plans of developing the property lands into a cheap housing project that would accommodate poor newcomers. The letters tell the story of yearning for the past, struggle to build a new life, attempts to mimic the past in the new reality, finally telling the story of a failure.

The presentation will deal with the question whether talking about history that did not happen is of any historical value or whether it is nothing but sentimentalism.