Mahmoud Widdi

Mahmoud Widdi was born in 1957 in Beit Hanina during a period of changing political boundaries. He was raised primarily by his mother and paternal grandfather, and joined his father, Subhi Widdi, in the United States in 1975. He and his cousin opened a Met Foodmarket grocery store in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1983, which they converted into a Foodtown in 2016. He and his wife maintain strong connections to their Palestinian heritage, regularly visiting Beit Hanina and the surrounding area with their children. See this narrator’s full biography and oral history.

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Oral History Clips:

Mahmoud Widdi describes the influence his father had on their neighborhood and the way the community memorialized him by petitioning the city to name a street in his honor.

See this Oral History Clip’s interactive transcript.

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