“Tiberias Gave Me Life” - Artist Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman returns home

Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman, a voice-development professional, artist, writer, and educator, returned to Tiberias after the antisemitic events that followed October 7. Now she hopes to help transform the city into a center of culture, art, and international connection.

“There is no culture here, there is no art,” she says. “We need to bring the world to Tiberias.”

When Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman heard about the “Swords of Iron” war two years ago, while living in Reggio Calabria Italy, she did not yet know that within two and a half years her life would change completely. The paintings, exhibitions, books, contacts, and the life she had built there remained behind. Still, for her, this is not a story of despair.

In the summer of 2025, after a long period of loneliness in a country where she could barely leave her home, she gathered her strength, packed a suitcase, and on the 13th of that month boarded a plane back to Tiberias.

“Tiberias gave me life,” she says. “I do not want to go anywhere else.”

Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman now sits in her home on Ha Rav Shach Street in Kiryat Shmuel, surrounded by dozens of works of art. “I am very emotional these days,” she says. “It is the year in which I returned to Tiberias, after eight and a half years in Italy.”

On the walls hang large three-dimensional works, created with a technique unique to her, which she developed years ago. She has around 400 works, most of them using glass.

Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was born and raised in Germany after the war. She first saw Israel in 1970, returned again in 2010 from Montevideo (Uruguay), and moved to Tiberias. Over the course of her life she has lived and worked in Germany, the United States, Ukraine, Hungary, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, and Italy etc.

“Thirteen times in my life I changed countries because of antisemitism,” she says. “Always with my things, with my paintings, with my books.”

Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman is a professor of voice development and the author of The Voice: A Spiritual Approach to Singing, Speaking and Communicating, first published in 1999 and later translated into Italian. In 2000 she founded an online school, teaching students from around the world for six hours a day.

“I taught people in Tokyo, everywhere,” she says.

Her method is based on the vocal technique of the Levites in the Holy Temple, and she often emphasizes that it is, in her view, unique in the world, connected to what the Book of Zohar preserves through Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai regarding the development of the voice.

This is already Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman’s second chapter in Tiberias. She first arrived in the city in 2013, from Tzfat. During that period, she says, her medical condition deteriorated and she did not leave her home for four years. Living about 800 meters from the Sea of Galilee, she says the city saved her life.

“Tiberias gave me life,” she repeats.

During that same period, she presented a large exhibition at the Yad Shitrit Cultural Center and founded the International Institute for Voice Development in the city, connecting her work with the conservatory and creating a musical environment around it.

Her first chapter in Tiberias ended after deep disappointment. “I understood that it was not possible to do what I wanted,” she explains. “In Italy they wanted me to give them the world.”

Between 2016 and 2025, she ran the State Academy for Voice Development, Torah, and Kabbalah in Calabria, southern Italy. She won literary and artistic prizes, including the Catalina Prize, the Carthago Prize, and the Cuttinelli Prize. In 2024 she was appointed Honorary Presidentof the Italian Institute for Jewish Culture.

Since 2021 she has also served as Ambassador of the Universal Peace Federation, Italy. She initiated and ran a nationwide competition under the title “Competition of Poetry for the Shoah and Peace - ong for the Memory of the Holocaust and for Peace.” She directed the initiative for five years throughout Italy. The competition drew more than 800 writers and included music, sacred texts, dialogue among Christians and Jewish communities, and descendants of Marranos seeking to return to their roots.

All of this, she says, ended at once with the outbreak of the war.

“I returned because of the antisemitism,” she says.

Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman describes herself as the only Orthodox Jewish woman in a Muslim-majority city, where she sank into deep loneliness for a year and a half after October 7.

“One day, no one opened the door for me,” she says. “There were no sons. I did not go out. I could not.”

During that period, she wrote two books. Eventually, a cousin from London came to help her, bringing her first to Miami and then to Brooklyn. It was difficult for her to return to life there, but the decision became clear.

“I said: this is not my place. I need Tiberias. Now I have been in Jerusalem, and again it ran through my mind: what are you doing in a place like this? Do you need to be in Jerusalem? I said: no. I need to be in Tiberias.”

Alongside her love for the city, she also speaks with sharp criticism.

“There is no culture in Tiberias, there is no art. There are no workers,” she says. “I am talking about people who write things of meaning for the world, not only about politics and the government, but about culture, about the ability to sing and to go out and eat falafel. That is not enough. People also need something for the soul.”

The biblical vision of revival that she received in a dream has become a mission for her. She wants to translate it into practical action: bringing artists, concerts, theater, and international cultural activity to Tiberias, and positioning the city as a cultural destination in Israel and beyond.

“The city is wonderful, and the world does not know enough about it,” she says.

One idea she is raising is a lecture series in a museum, similar to one she knew in Germany.

Meanwhile, Miriam Jaskierowicz Arman is focusing on her art. On September 3, she is expected to open in an exhibition at the Jerusalem Theater. “I will not say a word,” she says, explaining that in order to realize her vision for the city, she will need cooperation with the municipality.

“I need the hands of someone to help me do things,” she says. “I want Tiberias not only for the sake of the city, but for the city to be shaped internationally.”

“Now is the time that I want, I can, and I have the strength to truly do everything. To contribute from my knowledge.”