The Beersheba Center for the Arts

The story

The Beersheba Center for the Arts operates at 21 Anielewicz Street, in a building that is among the few from the early construction of the city that can be entered — most of the buildings of the period in the city are in private ownership. Its barred windows have been well preserved from the Ottoman period, and a colored floor in the pattern of an oriental carpet was laid in it in the 1920s. The building was surrounded by a wall, in the Turkish way of building, and the number of its rooms grew with the expansion of the family that lived in it, until the whole courtyard was surrounded by rooms. It is supposed that in the First World War it served as a barracks for the Ottoman army. After the war it was sold to an Arab family; part of the building was dismantled, the front rooms were demolished in the middle of the 1920s and of them only the windows in the outer wall survived, and on three sides of the courtyard rooms were built — one of them has a separate entrance from He-Halutz Street. On 20 October 1948, after the IDF entered Beersheba, the abandoned building served the Negev Brigade. In the spring of 1949, when it was handed over to the civil authority, a culture house of the Ministry of Education and Culture opened in it: artistic programs, the municipal library, and above all help in the absorption of new immigrants. An ulpan was set up in it in which about four hundred pupils studied in two groups, and in those days the house was called “a spiritual center in miniature for the immigrants of Beersheba”. The ulpan operated until 1953, and then the first high school in the city opened in the building — High School Alef — which after a few years moved to its permanent home in the new city. In 1970 an arts center for youth began to operate at the place, and when the range of ages of its pupils widened — children, youth and adults — its name was changed to “the Center for the Arts”. It is under the responsibility of the education and community administration of the Beersheba municipality.

• Ottoman
• Communities
• Education
• Beersheba