Emile Nicolas Berouti’s Family House in Jaffa
I first learned about a house in Jaffa that once belonged to the Berouti family from watching a documentary on Al Jazeera Arabic titled Encounter with a Lost Land. The film, directed by Maryse Gargour—whom I later discovered is my dad’s second cousin—is a beautiful and poignant account of life in Jaffa before and during the Nakba. Originally in French, it was dubbed into Arabic for Al Jazeera. For Arabic speakers, I highly recommend watching the full documentary. It’s an exploration of displacement and memory through the witnessing eyes of three French sisters who lived in Jaffa during that time. Their father, Dr. Patrice Boureau, was the head doctor at the French Hospital. Here is the clip, in Arabic, specifically relevant to the Berouti home:
In my search for more information about this house, I came across an article published in The Guardian in 2006, which touches on its story. According to the article, this house belonged to Emile Nicolas Berouti and his children (this was confirmed by Emile Berouti’s descendants). Emile Alexandre Berouti, one of his grandchildren, shares fragmented memories of the home he lived in before his family fled during the Nakba, when he was still a child. The article includes this heartbreaking excerpt:
“The Berouti family house in Jaffa - along with 45,000 others - was seized by the new Israel's Absorption Department that took control of all abandoned Palestinian homes and allocated them to Jewish refugees from Europe. Over the next three decades, while the Jewish population of Israel grew to almost 3 million, the Beroutis were among the 9 million Palestinians who sought new homes elsewhere. "My father died in exile in Beirut. He never recovered from the loss."
Naturally, I was curious about the house’s current status. I was fortunate to be acquainted with a Jaffa resident, a Jewish Israeli leftist named Yossi Granovski, who knew exactly where the house stood. He kindly took a few photographs and sent them to me. I’m sharing them below, along with another photo shared by a cousin and descendant of Emile.
The house’s exact location can be seen today from Google Earth. It is in Al-Ajami neighborhood, close to the Mediterranean Sea. Saint Anthony’s Latin Church is just a short walk away.
We can also see the exact house location on a Jaffa survey from 1944. It is encircled in bright blue in the image below.
The Berouti home still stands in this neighborhood, though it is now occupied by someone else. This house, like countless others, bears witness to the injustice and tragedy that befell the Palestinian people.