Preserving ‘trauma objects’ from Gaza border towns as living testimony

Since the Oct. 7 massacre, Yad Ben-Zvi’s Visual History and Documentation Department has gathered roughly 6,000 items in Netivot and many more across the region, preserving everything from charred family albums to everyday household goods. Curator Nirit Shalev-Khalifa says the objects serve as tangible proof of the pre-attack lives and the ensuing destruction, emphasizing that unrecorded memories fade away. What began as a brief post-attack effort expanded into a three-year, painstaking process of cataloguing each piece, a task she likens to a modern archaeological dig.

Collaboration with Heritage Ministry teams and 9/11 Memorial specialists introduced the concept of “trauma objects,” highlighting how ordinary items acquire new, memorial meanings after violent events. Families request the team to retrieve personal belongings, and the meticulous labeling of each artifact provides a therapeutic sense of order amid chaos. The initiative also employs conservation techniques to save wall markings and other fragile traces of daily life, ensuring that even demolished structures retain a recorded history.