Artists Quarter of Safed

The Artists' Quarter in Safed, also known as the Artists' Colony, was officially founded after the capture of Safed, in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. With the encouragement of the Safed municipality, a group of artists began to restore ruins in the Mamluk neighborhood of Harat al-Wata, on the border of the historic Jewish quarter, to build galleries and open exhibitions. However, artists had begun to settle in Safed prior to this. The first to discover Safed's artistic aura was Isaac Frenkel Frenel in 1920, followed by Moshe Castel and Mordechai Levanon in the 1930s. This attracted dozens of other artists to the Quarter.

Safed's mystic aura attracted a wide range of Israeli artists affiliated with different art movements, perhaps most notably the Jewish School of Paris spearheaded by Frenkel.

From the 1970s and onward, the Artists' Quarter began to lose its cachet. The founding generation died and those that remained refused to change with the times. Neglected infrastructure, lack of state support and demographic changes furthered the decline.