Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Karen Pe'er

What Was Lost

A PostMemory painting, drawn from a migration story I’ve heard so often, it echoes in me as if it were my own.

“"What Was Lost" is a visual elegy, tracing the journey of a Yemenite Jewish woman who leaves behind a land etched with tradition, devotion, and ancestral memory. In the shadow of the 1947 Aden pogroms, her community walks for days across scorched earth, carrying little but faith in a promised land. They board planes—strange birds of exile—and arrive in a land that promised hope, yet offers tents, illness, and the trauma of stolen children in return.Among the many things left behind was the Lahfe—a traditional headscarf worn by Yemenite Jewish women to mark their identity in a society that demanded distinction. In Israel, the need for such markers faded, and with it, the scarf itself. "What Was Lost" reflects this shift: a quiet letting go of visible customs, the grief of cultural loss, and the emergence of new ways of belonging in a place both foreign and full of possibility.”