Metula Poetry Festival to explores grief, resilience and renewal

Once a hallmark of Israel’s northernmost town, the Metula Poetry Festival will again be held in Jerusalem this September, as war damage continues to keep the Galilee border community from hosting.

The three-day event, September 3-5, will be held at Jerusalem’s Confederation House, directed by Effie Benaya, and with the support of the Culture Ministry, the Israel Lottery for Culture and Art, the Jerusalem Foundation and the Jerusalem Municipality.
All events have free admission.

Shiri Lev-Ari and Benny Ziffer, the artistic directors of the festival, noted that this year they wanted the event, which seeks to maintain a balance between veterans and newcomers, to focus on writing, touching on the country’s ongoing national situation. The majority of the festival will thus be dedicated to contemporary poetry, much of it written in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Poets will present works on grief and loss, resistance and defiance, the healing of physical and emotional wounds and attempts at recovery, neighborly and close relationships, and poetry as a path back to life.

The festival will give a voice to bereaved parents, including poet Giora Fischer from Be’er Tuvia, whose son was killed in an IDF operation in Jenin, and Eyal Kaminka, whose son was killed on October 7 in Zikim, near Gaza.

Rita Kogan will read her poem for the released hostage Liri Albag. Shlomo Efrati, a religious army reservist, will talk about identifying bodies of October 7 victims in his poem, “Iron Swords War Diary,” which has been translated into several languages, to wide acclaim worldwide.

Efrati will appear alongside poet and doctor Kineret Magen — whose book “Mom, a Helicopter is Coming” describes her experiences as part of one of the medical teams on October 7 — and poet Yoram Nissinovich, who dedicated his poem, “To Break from the Known Lines,” to his nephew who fell in the war.

In another event, author and poet Amir Harash will talk about traveling with other poets after October 7 to hotels full of evacuees and to border communities to help survivors and evacuees express themselves, and will present his recent works.

Two Israeli musicians with new memoirs will be special guests at the festival: Chava Alberstein, who will discuss her book “Canaan Alley,” and Ehud Banai, who will talk about his book “The Book of Green Onions.” Banai will be accompanied by his daughter, Zohar Banai, who will play her music.

There will be a memorial service for A.B. Yehoshua, the beloved Israeli writer whose death three years ago has created an intensified longing for his particular brand of fervent love for Israel.

The festival will close with a celebration marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Shaul Tchernichovsky, the Hebrew poet of humanism, secularism, and Zionist national sentiment.

The festival program appears on the Confederation House website.