Born in the Galilean town of Tarsheha in 1971, Rana Bishara obtained her BFA in 1993 from Haifa University and her MFA in 2003 from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, USA. Since 1994, she has held several solo exhibitions and has taken part in a large number of artist-in residence programs in Palestine, Switzerland and the USA. Her works can be found in such public and private collections as the Omi International Arts Center, Columbia Country, New York; The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts; Darat al-Funun, Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman; and the Yvette and Mazen Qupty Private Collection, Jerusalem. She currently heads the Visual Art Department at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, Jerusalem.
Khadija Soudah - Om Mahmoud
A survivor of the NAKBAH 1948 and a witness to Israeli crimes. Her family was all massacred (her husband, one daughter, and 3 sons) in an Israeli air strike on Tarsheha on September 29th, 1948.
Today, Khadija Soudah is over 90 years old. With her peaceful face and beautiful eyes, she still remembers all that happened to her family and still deeply mourns their loss. She breaks into tears while telling her painful story.
After the attack, she remarried and established a new family. Khadija Soudah is still living with her children and grandchildren in Tarsheha in the Upper Galilee of northern Palestine. One only can imagine how amazing she is to survive such tragedy and ethnic cleansing and trauma.
Prior to the NAKBAH, Tarsheha residents numbered 6,000. In 1948, most of them were exiled and even those who stayed lost lands, which were confiscated after the bombing of the village on September 29th. Tarsheha was and still is a very strategic location and a center of all the northern
villages surrounding it. Official statistics indicate that about 70,000 people from Tarsheha live dispersed around the world with no right of return. The remaining inhabitants in Tarsheha number about 4500.
Some oral history links about the Nakbah of Tarsheha town from Palestine remembered
