Women from Silwan, carrying containers filled with labneh. Silwan is now a neighborhood of Jerusalem c.1890 // The community is under threat of destruction and ethnic cleansing to make way for an Israeli theme park.
Silwan was established as a farming village, and the second Muslim Caliph, Umar ibn AlKhattad, invited Jews to live there - along with all areas of Jerusalem - for the first time after 500 years of persecution by the Christian Byzantium.
Towards the end of the 1880s, a group of Yemeni Jews emigrated to Silwan during the First Aliyah. This was after European Jews rejected them living in their communities and were instead invited to live with their fellow Arabs by the Palestinian residents of Silwan.