About the project
The Jerusalem Foundation established the Clubhouse for the Blind in Abu Tor in 1976 to serve approximately 250 blind and sight-impaired individuals from throughout the city. The facility provided leisure and educational resources for adults and children, including a Braille library, a lecture room, computer laboratory and music equipment. The Foundation supported the addition of the Moris de Gutt Pavilion, an events hall, in 1984 and the later purchase of equipment, including upgrading the clubhouse’s computer center in 1995. It also supported many activities over the years, including Braille, music, and dancing lessons at the clubhouse and subsidies for cultural events. Armchair with Cat, a stone sculpture created by Israeli sculptors Varda Ghivoly (b. 1947, Poland) and Ilan Gelber (b. 1951, Israel,) was placed in front of the clubhouse in 1992. The work, sculpted at the Jerusalem Stone Sculpture Workshop, is typical of Ghivoly and Gelber, both children of Holocaust survivors, who create larger-than-life representations of furniture, fruit and other symbols of bourgeois European life. The Clubhouse for the Blind relocated in 2005. The facility was converted for use as the Center for the Diagnosis & Rehabilitation of Hearing Impaired Arab Children.
