VIRTUAL RETURNS TO JAFFA

We city of Jaffa was the most important commercial and cultural center of Arab Palestine before the 1948 war. At the end of April of that ye ar, the city was captured by the combined Jewish forces of the Haganah , Irgun and Lehi. Except for several thousand people, its 70,000 inhab itants fled during the fighting or were expelled and were never allowe d to return to their homes. The following pieces were selected from a series of electronic memoirs/reflections initiated by Salim Tamari in 1995 and exchanged by a group of twelve Jaffa exiles living across the globe. The correspondence was later taken over by two young academics living in Jaffa, Andre Mazawi and Haytham Sawalhi, and transformed in to a Web page on the city of Jaffa (http://www.yafa.org).