RAMLA, Israel – In an underground reservoir, below the Israeli city of Ramla, the stone walls echo with an Arab-Jewish harmony at odds with the frictions of the world above.
Visitors to the medieval site, built 1,233 years ago by Muslim rulers, enter and hear the words of Jewish liturgical poetry and Arabic folk songs, each sung to the same Arabic music.
To listen to the composition, descend from street level via a steep staircase to a turquoise pool. From a jetty at the bottom you step into a white sloop. Then you’ll paddle across the carp-filled water, under several loudspeakers and through an arcade of 36 stone arches that give the place its name: Pool of the Arches.
You can hear Jewish poetry under the loudspeakers in the eastern arches. Under the western arches, the Arabic songs. And in the middle a mix of the two. Every song is different, but they are mostly slow, somber melodies that mix ethereal vocals with the strumming of an oud.
“Art that brings people together,” says Jalil Dabit, one of the first visitors to the musical installation and a member of the Palestinian minority in Israel. “Perfect for Ramla,” he added.
Any cross-cultural project in Israel — where many Arabs complain about systemic discrimination by Jews, and many Jews fear they will never be accepted by Arabs — has the potential to feel resonating or contrived.
In Ramla, one of Israel’s so-called mixed cities, that potential is even greater.
Ramla was founded in the early eighth century during the Umayyad Caliphate and was briefly a Christian stronghold during the Middle Ages. After the conquest by the new state of Israel in 1948, Israeli soldiers expelled thousands of Arabs from the city. Today, the population of 76,000 is an ethnic mix – three quarters are Jewish, one quarter Arab.
During last year’s ethnic unrest triggered by the latest war in Gaza, Ramla was one of many mixed cities where Arab and Jewish civilians were fighting.
Against this backdrop, the local art museum, Contemporary Art Center Ramla, seeks to address tensions and bring art to a city often overlooked by Israel’s cultural elite. The one-year installation at the underground reservoir ‘Reflection’ is one of the center’s flagship initiatives.
“It gives everyone the chance to have their own voice,” said Smadar Sheffi, the center’s director.
When the reservoir was built in 789, the inhabitants of the city drew water by lowering buckets from small openings in the roof of the reservoir. Today, the project’s speakers hang from the same openings.
From those loudspeakers comes a 22-minute cycle of four Arabic love songs, each played simultaneously with four Jewish religious poems. All the songs and poems are at least a century old and each of the four pairs is set to a different Arabic tune.
In one matchup, an Arabic anthem popularized in the 1970s by Fairuz, a Lebanese singer, is set against a Jewish poem written in the 19th century by Rafael Antebi, a Syrian-born rabbi. The Arabic song depicts a hypnotized lover, while the Hebrew verse speaks of an exiled Jew’s longing for Zion.
All songs and poems were recorded by a team of three singers – two Jewish and one Arab. They were then joined by Dor Zlekha Levy, an Israeli artist who led the project, and Yaniv Raba, an Israeli composer.
Mr. Zlekha Levy, 32, often focuses his work on this kind of linguistic overlap and says that as a teenager he became fascinated by the relationship between Jewish and Arab culture. His grandfather was one of more than 120,000 Arabic-speaking Jews who fled or were expelled from Iraq in the early 1950s. He continued to watch Arabic films on a weekly basis until he died decades later, and regularly visited Arab communities in Israel, sparking his grandson’s interest.
In 2008, Mr. Zlekha Levy Cordoba, the Spanish city where Muslims and Jews lived side by side in the Middle Ages. Sitting in the city’s cathedral, a former mosque near the home of Maimonides, a revered medieval Jewish philosopher, Mr. Zlekha Levy received a revelation. He realized that he wanted to create art that evoked a similar cultural exchange.
It was “kind of motivation,” he said. “I really try to mimic this kind of experience.”
For those familiar with the above-ground tensions in Israel, Mr. Zlekha Levy’s project at the reservoir may seem like a gimmick. But there is an organic quality to it, both politically and artistically, according to residents and organizers.
Within Ramla, where Arab-Jewish relations are relatively less fraught than in some other mixed cities, the investment in the project reflects the relative willingness of the city authorities to support intercultural exchange.
During the ethnic unrest last May, violence was brought under control much more quickly than in Lod, another mixed city nearby – thanks to better ties between the leaders of Ramla’s different communities and more inclusive municipal leadership.
After the riots broke out, the city’s Jewish mayor went door-to-door with local Arab and Jewish leaders to persuade people to stay at home. The mayor also hosted a community dinner on the street where dozens of Jewish and Arab community leaders gathered, again appeasing the anger.
“I would be naive to think that there are no challenges – we are in a conflict that has been going on here for generations,” said Malake Arafat, an Arab school principal in Ramla.
But there are strong bridges between Ramla’s different communities, Ms Arafat said. “And they are embedded in the fabric of everyday life,” she added. For example, she said her Arab students participate in community projects in the school’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and some of those Jewish neighbors come to the school’s events.
Likewise, the artistic concept of mixing Jewish liturgy with Arabic music is also a phenomenon with long roots in the real world. The practice is often heard in many contemporary synagogues run by Jews of Middle Eastern descent.
Even after moving to Israel in the early years of the state, many Jews from the Arab world, known as Mizrahi Jews, still retained an affection and affinity for the Arabic songs they grew up hearing on the radio.
Religious Mizrahim wanted to use that music as part of their religious practice. To make it suitable for the solemnity of a synagogue, they took the original Arabic tunes and overlaid them with Hebrew texts, some written by rabbis and some taken from parts of the Torah.
Moshe Habusha, a prominent Mizrahi musician, regularly performed these compositions for Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel who died in 2013 and whose legacy still dominates Mizrahi religious society.
In fact, Mr. Zlekha Levy and his collaborator, Mr. Raba, used combinations of Hebrew poems and Arabic tunes that were already Mizrahi religious staples.
They then tweaked those combinations and recorded Jewish singers and musicians performing the new arrangements.
Separately, they recorded an Arab artist who sang the Arabic lyrics of the Arabic love songs, to the same Arabic music as the Jewish poems.
In the end they decided to play the recordings of both the Jewish poems and the Arabic songs side by side in the middle of the reservoir. So as you float under the central arches, you hear both melodies – creating the perception of a single, unified composition, even though the two recordings remain in effect separate tracks, played from separate speakers.
“There is a deep connection between the cultures,” said Mr. Zlekha Levy.
“We’re not that different from each other,” he added. “And that is also what this installation is investigating.”
Myra Noveck and Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.