After Oct. 7, Israel’s new National Library helps a resilient nation turn the page

In early October 2023, Tsila Hayun, director of the National Library’s culture and exhibitions department, met with her staff to discuss the dress code for a series of events celebrating the upcoming October 15 opening of the newly constructed NIS 860 million ($225 million) space.

Less than a week later, after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror onslaught that saw some 1,200 people slaughtered and 251 taken hostage to the Gaza Strip, every ceremony and event was canceled.

“Canceling is a kind of event as well,” said Hayun. “But we had to figure it out.”

For several weeks, the library was only open to readers and scholars who were accessing its more than 4 million books and its workstations, study rooms, computers, and staff of professional librarians.

“We didn’t have any idea what it would look like. Would people even come?” said Hayun of a celebratory library launch.

The library’s management wondered whether it was appropriate to open a new cultural institution when thousands of people had just been killed or injured, hundreds had been taken hostage, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were heading out to war.

Library staff members were mourning loved ones and in anguish over the hostage situation, chilling details of which were becoming clearer by the hour.

Slowly, despite the war, the trauma, and the losses, the library opened its doors to visitors who wanted to see the elegant circular reading rooms visible through floor-to-ceiling windows from the lobby or the robots transporting the books underground.

They wanted to visit the permanent exhibit featuring the writings of Maimonides, Naomi Shemer’s first draft of the 1973 song “Lu Yehi,” and Leah Goldberg’s poems.

And people came, in droves.

“It was like a happening, like a kind of miracle, because in one moment, people began coming,” said Hayun.

The reading rooms were filled with new faces, and tickets for the visitors’ center kept selling out.

“People came from all over — older people, young families with kids. People in uniform came straight from the front,” said Hayun. “We asked them, ‘Why did you come here right now?’ And they said, ‘This is what we’re fighting for, a place of Israeli culture and spirit.’”

The library staff kept hearing that the building and its collections were a symbol, the very essence of Israel.

In the meantime, the former National Library building on the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University was partially converted into a secondary school for evacuated students from the northern town of Shlomi, whose residents were scattered around eight Jerusalem hotels.

On the lower floor of the new building’s reading rooms, rows of yellow chairs were set up to symbolize the hostages, each with one of their favorite books placed on a seat.

Visitors would enter from a spot just outside the library, which faces the Knesset and became the regular location for rallies, protests and sit-ins. “People walked in with tear-stained faces and told us that this building was letting them breathe,” said Hayun.

“We were so surprised, just so surprised,” said library director Oren Weinberg. “We thought people would come to see the building, but it’s clear that that’s only part of the experience. A library can have an effect beyond just studying.”

Soon after opening to visitors, Hayun and her team replanned the events, looking for performers and subjects that made sense for their potential audiences.

One of the first events was “Southern Wind,” an evening of spoken word featuring artists from the Gaza border communities who described how their lives had changed since October 7.

A musical performance in January featured renowned rocker Berry Sakharof and Yaara Cohen, a young musician from the south who was evacuated with her family and who sang a song she composed about her music teacher, Shlomi Mathias, killed with his wife in Kibbutz Holit on October 7.

In the summer, the library’s Docutext film festival premiered “We Will Dance Again,” a documentary about the Nova desert rave, with families of the Nova victims present for the outdoor screening in the library garden.

Nearly all events were completely sold out, said Hayun.

“This place is like a pilgrimage site for people seeking an experience in this unexpected historical moment,” said Hayun. “People told us there’s beauty here, and I knew what they meant.”

There’s more than literary power in the 11-story building designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron in dialogue with the local Israeli Mann Shinar architectural team to make the national, cultural landmark look like a giant opened book.

There’s physical beauty and an impressive building, with lushly planted gardens and a carved stone roof that rises to meet the Knesset and dips down to offer views of the Israel Museum.

“People are affected by its beauty,” said Hayun. “There are not many places like this in Israel. It’s also warm and personal, people touch the wood and the walls, they harken to the rounded lines.”

There were also plenty of hiccups, such as performers who canceled on the morning of their performance, because “they just couldn’t commit and we couldn’t blame them,” said Hayun.

Hayun isn’t new to trauma and rehabilitation. Her family’s car was ambushed by terrorists in August 2003 when she and her husband Chaim, a Bible teacher at Seminar Hakibbutzim College of Education, and their three children were minutes from their home in Har Gilo, south of Jerusalem. They were returning from a vacation in the Sinai Desert.

Hayun was hit by seven bullets in the abdomen, legs, right hand and back. Her 11-year-old daughter suffered less serious injuries from bullets in her arm and foot and shrapnel in her eye, and her husband and the other children had no injuries.

Hayun survived, went through significant rehabilitation and had to rebuild her life.

After October 7, Hayun thought she would need to leave the library and go south to help the Gaza border communities heal.

It wasn’t just her own experience that she was drawing upon. Prior to joining the library, Hayun had started several programs and organizations.

She founded and ran Hotam, a socially conscious production company that helped redefine the Hebrew Book Festival, and created Autosefer, a mobile bookstore for children that travels all over Israel.

Within several weeks of October 7, Hayun received a call from a friend seeking a space in Jerusalem on Friday for a therapy session for those caring for the survivors.

Hayun offered a space in the library without a second thought, and it developed into what’s now known as Ararat—Resilience of the Spirit. It’s a program designed to provide therapists with a group space and practical tools to help build leadership resilience through engagement with the body, mind, spirit, and community.

“We’re not doctors or combat soldiers or social workers, but we can bring inspiration,” said Hayun.

The Ararat group “is not a usual national library kind of event,” said Weinberg. “What happens outside the walls comes in here and gets told in all sorts of ways, but the strength of this place is that it can hold it all.”

Weinberg said there’s still plenty of fine-tuning that needs to happen for a full cultural calendar that aims to appeal to the local Jerusalem crowd as well as the rest of the country and beyond.

Still, the pain and anguish of October 7 is present in the building.

The library recently dedicated a smooth stone bench in memory of Yizhar Hoffman, an executive engineer for Electra Construction, the contractor for the new building and a commander in the IAF’s elite Shaldag unit who fell in battle in Gaza in January 2024.

Family members whose loved ones were killed on October 7, or in battle in the 16 months since, come to the library to see its electronic memorial wall, where images and names of those who were killed is projected on a giant 20-meter (65-foot)-long screen as part of the Library’s Bearing Witness project to document October 7 and its aftermath in Israel and abroad.

The names of the fallen are updated regularly.

“This place is part of Israeli society,” said Weinberg, who has led the library since 2010, overseeing the dramatic design and construction process.

“We planned this place to be a part of the people, with the books as part of the identity, but for people to meet here, to learn here, to create here,” he said.

It’s become clear since October 7 that Israelis are looking for a place to feel comfortable with people who are very different from them, said Weinberg, glancing around the library cafe one afternoon and noting the mix of clientele.

“Everyone comes here, young religious women and local high school kids, PhD students and Haredi scholars,” he said. “It’s like the Dizengoff Center of Jerusalem, and everyone fits in here, which is kind of amazing.”