Hadar Morag tells il manifesto: Holocaust survivor refused stolen Palestinian home in Jaffa

The dishes were still on the table. The Palestinian family who had eaten from them had been driven out.

When the Holocaust survivor who was offered their house saw what had happened, she refused to move in. She asked to be taken back to the tent where she had been living.

This extraordinary family story was recounted by Israeli filmmaker Hadar Morag in an interview with journalist Lucrezia Ercolani, published by the Italian newspaper il manifesto on 29 October 2023.

Morag said her grandmother arrived after the Holocaust with nothing. Her entire family had been exterminated. The Jewish Agency promised her a house, but for a long time she remained in a tent, living in extremely precarious conditions.

Eventually she was brought to a beautiful house by the sea in Ajami, Jaffa. There, Morag said, her grandmother saw the dishes belonging to the Palestinian Arabs who had lived in the house and had been expelled.

Those dishes made the dispossession impossible to ignore. The home was ready for a new occupant, but the people whose home it had been had not taken even their ordinary belongings with them.

According to Morag, her grandmother returned to the Jewish Agency and demanded to go back to the tent. She would not do to another family what had been done to her.

The story sits within the wider history of the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Many Palestinian residents of Jaffa were displaced, and their homes were subsequently occupied or assigned to others.

Morag did not present her grandmother’s decision as something everyone made. She described it as a moral inheritance — and ended with the question that continues to haunt her: “How could we have become what we opposed?”

The account is Morag’s own family testimony, published in the original il manifesto interview; the specific incident has not been independently established from contemporary records. The historical displacement of Palestinians from Jaffa in 1948, by contrast, is extensively documented.

Featured photograph: Palestinian families leaving Jaffa in 1948, carrying their belongings in prams and carts. UNRWA / UN Photo, photographer unknown. The image documents the exodus from Jaffa; it does not show the specific family described by Morag.

Sources

Lucrezia Ercolani, “Hadar Morag: Il trauma toglie la parola ma bisogna fermare la guerra,” il manifesto, 29 October 2023. Original Italian-language interview.

UNRWA / UN Photo, “Palestinians fleeing Jaffa, 1948”. Archival photograph and image attribution.

UNESCO Memory of the World: UNRWA Photo and Film Archives of Palestinian Refugees.