The Galilee Foundation regrets to announce the death of Dr Rawda Bishara-Atallah, the Director of the Arab Culture Association, the Foundation’s major partner in the Galilee. Dr Attallah passed away on 29 December. The Arab Culture Association has been working since 2007 with the Foundation on developing and implementing its main educational project – The Scholarship Programme.
The Galilee Foundation is saddened to lose such an exceptional figure, who played an instrumental role amongst the Palestinian community and their struggle for equality, and national and cultural rights. Rawda will be remembered for her perseverance, tireless work and pioneering projects aimed at preserving the Palestinian Arab culture which was, and still is, subject to constant and systematic threats of erasure. She will be remembered personally by dozens of young Palestinians whom she believed in, and invested in.
Rawda, you will be dearly missed.
The Galilee Foundation
Dr Rawda Bishara-Atallah was born in Nazareth in 1953 and graduated from the Baptist School in 1971. She studied at the Academy of Dentistry in Sofia and graduated in 1979 as the first Arab female dentist amongst the Palestinian community in Israel. Rawda had a pioneering and leading role socially, culturally and nationally from the early ’80s, when she participated in the establishment of the first kindergarten in the Arab community in 1980. She worked as director of the School of Dental Assistants from 1985 to 1992 , and served as a director of the Arab Culture Association from 2000 to 2003, and from 2005 to until her death in December 2013. She initiated and implemented dozens of projects aimed at preserving the Arab Palestinian national identity, culture and heritage, including the Arabic language.
Rawda’s family is originally from Iqrit (Iqrith), a Christian village in upper Galilee, which was forcibly depopulated in 1948 and destroyed by Jewish militias except for the village’s church. Rawda was laid to rest in the cemetery in Iqrit.
