Our Story

MERVAT JACKAMAN | FOUNDER OF  PALGLASS

My name is Mervat Jackaman, and I produce decorative items out of recycled glass in the city of Bethlehem in Palestine.

Before 2004, my husband was a worker with low income. One day I saw an offer for a one-month training to learn to  work and carve glass and to create objects and decorations with it. It took all my courage to subscribe. The training was very short and basic. But I wanted to continue to learn and to work, hoping that this handicraft with glass could help my family to survive. After the course, I continued and learned all by myself and worked on my techniques.

It was extremely difficult to organize myself, as I had to take care of the children and at the same time work and learn. Therefore, I always started working very early in the morning around 6 am and continued working until late at night, after I brought my children to bed.

Everything we produce is handmade! Now we even develop our own tools and machines to work with the material.

Everything we produce comes from our imagination, our ideas, what we love! Most of our products are Christmas decorations and they come directly from Bethlehem, the Heart of Nativity. This is something celebrated and embraced every day as Christian minority in our city.

Our raw material is glass bottles that were thrown away by restaurants, bars or from family members or friends. We ask them to not throw anything away, but to give us their used bottles: sometimes we get it for free, sometimes we have to pay. This is why our angels are green and brown for instance: those are the colors of the glass we receive!

I have a deep passion for my products. Our creations are everything for us: we clean the streets from abandoned glass and we transform seemingly “dead material” and used bottles into new, living objects. Our creations have a soul! My soul, our soul, the soul of my family, which we insert with every step of the production.