Omnia
Lyd/Lod
Arabic for "hope." The name of a women's organization in Lod, and the name of the first Arabic library in the city.
Rana is a Palestinian citizen of Israel who lives in Lod/Lyd, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in central Israel where about 25,000 Palestinian citizens and 52,000 Jewish Israelis live side by side.
Eight years ago, Rana founded Omnia, a women's organization named after the Arabic word for hope. It began as a support space for working mothers in Lod and Ramle, a place where women could gather, share the specific difficulties of their lives, and organize around them. Since its first meeting, over 2,000 women have moved through its programs.
In 2022, Omnia opened the first Arabic library in Lod. A month before the opening, the library was broken into and vandalized. The Omnia women organized a volunteer day and repaired what had been destroyed. The library opened on schedule.
Today, it is a quiet, safe space where students study and children discover reading in their own language. That matters here: an international study found the gap in scores between Jewish and Arab students in Israel is the largest such gap in all 79 countries surveyed. Building a library in Arabic in Lod is not a symbolic act. It is a response to a specific reality.
