Ilana Goor Museum

The museum's account of its own building starts with a date and a name. It was raised in 1742 by Yaakov Zonana, who is described as head of the Committee of Officers in Constantinople, and it worked as a pilgrimage inn: shelter for travellers who had come ashore at Jaffa and still had the road to Jerusalem in front of them. The Hebrew Wikipedia entry calls it the first Jewish inn in Jaffa and describes three storeys behind very heavy walls.

The walls are the part of the story that explains the rest. The inn stood outside the town walls, which is why the Jewish Virtual Library's account of the building stresses its massive construction and its function as protection from robbers as much as accommodation. Jaffa was the landing point for the interior, and an eighteenth-century pilgrim arriving by sea was at his most exposed in the hours between the boat and the road.

How much of this is documented and how much is house tradition is worth stating plainly. The chronology above comes from the museum's own page on the building, and the encyclopaedia entries that repeat it draw on the same source. There is no published excavation of the site, no antiquities file the museum points visitors to, and no survey separating one building phase from another. The 1742 date is the museum's, consistently given, and it is the only date on offer.

• 1742: built as an inn for Jewish pilgrims, per the museum
• Three storeys behind heavy walls, per the Hebrew Wikipedia entry
• Outside the town walls, so built for protection as well as lodging
• No published excavation or building survey of the site

In the second half of the nineteenth century the inn became a factory making soap and perfume from olive oil, which was one of the region's export goods in that period. The Hebrew Wikipedia entry says the works were run by an established Muslim family. The trace of that industry is still in the building: a stone oven survives in a basement that Goor says she found during the restoration, sealed off from the rest of the house.

The twentieth century used it as housing and then as a shell. From 1949, part of the building served as a synagogue for immigrants from the Jewish community of Libya. In the 1950s families arriving from the Balkans were housed in it, in what both the museum and the Hebrew entry describe as poor sanitary conditions. In the 1970s artists began moving into Old Jaffa generally, which is the context for what happened next.

By the time Goor came to buy the remainder, in the early 1990s, that remainder was abandoned. The museum's own version is that she bought it without knowing what was inside, and the Hebrew entry adds the detail that getting in meant drilling through a wall. Two and a half centuries of continuous use had ended not in preservation but in a locked ruin in the middle of a tourist quarter.

Goor bought her first portion of the building in 1983 as a private home, at a point when the rest of it was somebody else's problem. She acquired the remainder in the early 1990s and put about three years into reconstruction, working, on the museum's account, to keep the old architectural character while making the place habitable. The museum opened in September 1995.

A handful of features are presented as genuinely old, and they are the things to look for. The ceiling in the sculpture room is an eighteenth-century construction using what the museum calls the beehive technique, with amphorae set into the fabric to lighten the span and insulate it. The basement oven belongs to the soap and cosmetics period. A lattice screen the museum dates to the nineteenth century, and describes as a place from which Muslim women could watch without being seen, is now hung with conceptual work about gender. Rooms and blocked openings turned up during the works.

Everything else is a 1990s intervention, and the museum does not pretend otherwise. The circulation, the lighting, the stair runs, the roof sculpture garden and the whole arrangement of objects are hers. No conservation report has been published that separates original fabric from new work room by room, so the honest reading for a visitor is this: the shell and the specific features named above are old, the museum inside them is thirty years old, and the two were never meant to be told apart by eye.

That is also the argument for coming. A restored courtyard house in Old Jaffa is usually a hotel lobby or a gallery with white walls. This one kept its awkward levels, its low doorways and its dark corners, and then filled them.

• 1983: Goor buys part of the building as a home
• Early 1990s: buys the rest, then about three years of reconstruction
• Old: the amphorae ceiling, the basement oven, the nineteenth-century lattice screen
• New: the layout, lighting, stairs and roof garden

The museum states a holding of more than 500 works, accumulated over fifty years of travel in Israel and abroad, with some 300 of them sculpture. The rest is paintings, drawings, video, design objects, antiques and a substantial body of ethnic art from Africa and South America, which the museum names as a dominant theme rather than a sideline.

The names run a long way in both directions. Alongside Goor's own iron and bronze there is Henry Moore, Diego Giacometti, Alexander Archipenko, Josef Albers, Anselm Kiefer, Gerrit Rietveld and Frank Gehry; on the Israeli side Menashe Kadishman, Uri Lifshitz and Ya'acov Dorchin among the established figures, and Sigal Avni, Vered Aharonovitch, Fatma Shanan and Lior Shtainer among the newer ones. The stated criterion is a strong sense of self-expression and social or political awareness, which is a collector's rule rather than a curator's, and the results look like it.

The building is divided into named rooms rather than chronological galleries. There is a central space of monumental sculpture, a design room of lighting and ironwork, a monks' room where original monks' tables carry Goor's installation The Morning After, a library of Hebrew and foreign literature dedicated to her grandfather, the ethnic art rooms, the sculpture room under the amphorae ceiling, the lattice space, an upper-level passage hung with Israeli artists, a room of crucifixes and relics, and the roof garden. English Wikipedia records that the mixture has been called an artistic jungle, and that Goor has called it her own university.

Her own standing is easy enough to check outside the building. Never Again stands at Yad Vashem, Woman Against the Wind at Charles Clore Park on the Tel Aviv seafront, and the Smiling Whale of 1985 in Old Jaffa itself, a short walk from the museum door and free to look at. On formal training the accounts differ: her museum biography and the English Wikipedia entry both describe her as an autodidact who did not complete art studies, while the curriculum vitae published on the same site lists Bezalel in Jerusalem in 1955 and 1956.

The museum publishes 10.00 to 16.00 from Sunday to Thursday and on Saturday, and 10.00 to 14.00 on Friday. Admission is 45 NIS for an adult, 35 NIS for a resident of Tel Aviv-Yafo, 25 NIS for a soldier, a senior or a student, 20 NIS for a child aged five to seventeen, and 100 NIS for a family ticket covering two adults and three children. The museum says tickets are sold at the door and nothing needs booking in advance.

Guided tours run 45 to 60 minutes, in Hebrew and English as standard and in Spanish, Portuguese or Russian on request, and they carry an extra charge arranged through the museum's tours office. The museum has also advertised a Friday tour at noon included in the admission price, with a note that it is on hold until further notice, so it is not something to build a Friday around without ringing first.

Access is the honest weak point, and the museum's own accessibility statement, dated 27 July 2023, is the document to read. It lists disabled parking in an adjacent car park and an accessible entrance through the museum shop at 1 Mazal Arieh Street rather than the main door at 4 Mazal Dagim, and it states that there are no lifts. A three-storey house with a roof terrace and no lift means most of the display is reached by stairs, and the lanes outside are stepped and cobbled. Wheelchair users should phone the accessibility coordinator before coming.

Getting there is a walk in every case. The museum lists the Jaffa Port, goldsmiths' and flea market car parks and the seafront lots by Charles Clore Park, Dan bus routes 10, 18, 41 and 44 to the Yefet and Louis Pasteur stop, and the light rail Red Line to Bloomfield Stadium with a walk in from there. The street names are worth decoding on the way: Mazal Dagim is Pisces and Mazal Arieh is Leo, because the lanes on this side of Old Jaffa carry the signs of the zodiac.