Beit Ha'am

The story

Beit Ha'am is a public building in the Civic Center, erected at the end of the 1950s thanks to the donation of the Shaiber brothers, the Beersheba municipality and the Neuman Fund, close to the Keren cinema. About a decade later the city hall was built next to it, and between them extended Gan Moshe. At the cornerstone-laying ceremony, in July 1956, there were present the mayor David Tuviyahu, the donors David and Nathan Shaiber of St. Louis in the United States, and a large crowd. The construction cost 450 thousand lirot: one hundred thousand dollars were donated by the Shaiber brothers, about one hundred thousand lirot the municipality added from its budget, and the rest came from the Neuman Fund and from other institutions. The building included a large hall of about three hundred and fifty seats and a small hall of up to one hundred, and on the ground floor a restaurant and a patio courtyard, and on the second floor spacious rooms. In April 1959 a festive opening was held in it on the occasion of the ninth national convention of the National Labour Federation. In 1964 the Institute for Education and Art opened in it, under the management of Zechariah Liraz, with about forty classes and lectures for the general public. In 1973 the Beersheba Theatre was founded, and Beit Ha'am was its permanent home until the Performing Arts Center was completed in 2008; since then it has served as a school for acting.

• 1948
• Communities
• People
• Education
• Beersheba