ANU, Museum of the Jewish People

Nahum Goldmann, the founder and president of the World Jewish Congress, proposed the institution in 1959 as an educational and cultural centre for world Jewry, and it was named in his honour. The building came first. On the museum's own account, an architectural competition opened in 1960 with an evaluation committee chaired by Mies van der Rohe; the winning plan was by Eli Gvirtzman, then little known, who was joined by Itzhak Yashar. Construction started in 1967, the front wing holding the library and archive was finished in 1969, and the museum opened on 15 May 1978 with President Efraim Katzir and Goldmann present.

What went inside it was the argument. Abba Kovner, one of the founders, devised the core exhibition on a thematic rather than chronological principle, six gates covering family, community, faith, culture, existence and return. Jeshajahu Weinberg was the first director, from 1978 to 1984, and later founded the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Meyer Weisgal was the first president. The exhibitions were built from reconstructions and sets, and the designers deliberately set aside the convention that a museum acquires and displays objects.

The narrative that ran through those gates was as deliberate as the method. The Tel Aviv Review of Books summarised the old exhibition in its opening and closing images: it began with an enlarged replica of the relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome, Roman soldiers carrying the menorah away from the destroyed Temple, and ended with the menorah again and the war of 1948. Exile begins in catastrophe and ends in return. That is the reading the rebuild set out to replace.

It nearly did not survive to be rebuilt. Budget cuts and a fall in tourism produced a crisis, and the campaign to save the museum drew in the former Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo Lahat and Ariel Sharon. The Knesset passed a law in 2005 making Beit Hatfutsot the national centre for Jewish communities in Israel and abroad, and a recovery plan followed with the government, Leonid Nevzlin's NADAV Foundation and the Claims Conference.

• The six gates of the 1978 exhibition: family, community, faith, culture, existence, return
• Building: Eli Gvirtzman with Itzhak Yashar, from a competition judged by a committee under Mies van der Rohe
• Construction from 1967, front wing complete 1969, museum open 15 May 1978
• First director Jeshajahu Weinberg, 1978 to 1984; first president Meyer Weisgal
• 1985: the Knesset Speaker's Quality of Life Award
• 2005: the Knesset law making it the national centre for Jewish communities

The renewal was done in stages around a museum that stayed in business. The first stage, in 2016, added a wing: rotating temporary exhibitions, the Alfred H. Moses and Family Synagogue Hall, and Heroes, an interactive children's gallery. The three floors of core galleries opened on 10 March 2021, tripling exhibition space to 6,700 square metres, and the institution took the name ANU, chosen, in board chair Irina Nevzlin's words, to embrace inclusion and reflect the diversity and collective spirit of the Jewish people everywhere.

The money came from three directions. The Times of Israel reported at the reopening that close to a third of the $100 million came from Leonid Nevzlin's NADAV Foundation, $52 million from other United States philanthropists and foundations, and $18 million from the Israeli government. The published credits name Dr Orit Shaham Gover as chief curator, Prof Israel Bartal and Prof Gideon Shimoni as authors of the renewal conception, and the Washington firm Gallagher and Associates as head designer.

What changed is not the technique, which is still screens, sets and staged scenes, but the argument: Jewish life is presented as plural rather than as a single road leading to Israel. The Tel Aviv Review of Books called the result multicultural, multilingual, multi-denominational and multi-ethnic, and beautifully executed; its criticism was that ANU downplays its own Israeli setting, and makes a case a substantial bloc of the Knesset openly rejects.

The route starts at the top. Visitors enter on the ground floor and are sent up to floor 3, then work down, which inverts the usual museum chronology and puts living people first. Floor 3, the Mosaic, is subtitled Identity and Culture in Our Times and covers folklore and the arts, language and literature, the denominations and the Jewish contribution to wider culture. It opens with a hall of full-height screens on which, by the Tel Aviv Review of Books count, twenty-one Jews of different backgrounds each speak in their own language at once, before walls of enlarged family photographs.

The same floor carries the culture galleries the museum is best known for: food, film, theatre, music and comedy, ending in a section called Luminaries. Leonard Cohen's guitar and Ruth Bader Ginsburg's lace collar are there, with caricatures by the illustrator Yirmi Pinkus and media stations holding the biographies of 150 famous Jews; reporting at the reopening also listed Isaac Bashevis Singer's typewriter and a model of E.T. The Tel Aviv Review of Books thought the run of famous names close to a triumphal procession, saved by its playfulness.

Floor 2, the Journey, is the history: migrations, the large centres of Jewish life, scholarship, persecution, the Holocaust, the founding of the state and communities today. It is the most conventional of the three and the most crowded with text, and it is where a tiring visitor should be selective. Floor 1, the Foundations, deals with Shabbat, the covenant, the year and the life cycle, and with the reception of the Hebrew Bible in world culture. It is built largely from modern artistic interpretations rather than historic objects, and it ends at the synagogue models.

• Floor 3, the Mosaic: identity and culture now, the language installation, Luminaries
• Floor 2, the Journey: the historical narrative from antiquity to the present
• Floor 1, the Foundations: Shabbat, the covenant, the life cycle, the Bible in world culture
• Ground floor: lobby, cafe, shop, the Heroes children's gallery and the Codex Sassoon gallery

Almost nothing in a museum of this kind is what it appears to be, and here the rule is easy to state. The building is genuinely from the 1960s, the shell Gvirtzman and Yashar designed, and the wide lobby that lets people cross the campus without a ticket is part of the original conception. The galleries inside are new.

The synagogue models are the thread back to 1978. They were the signature of the old museum, and the Times of Israel reported at the reopening that eleven of the replicas were still there, touched up and rehoused in their own gallery. The museum's own page for the Alfred H. Moses and Family Synagogue Hall, opened in May 2016, describes an exhibition of 21 models. The figures need not conflict, since the hall was rebuilt and enlarged around the older models, but no published source reconciles them.

Elsewhere the older material was reused rather than retired: the Tel Aviv Review of Books noted plaster replicas of the medieval Ecclesia and Synagoga figures and several old dioramas reappearing on the Journey floor. What is new is the presence of real objects at all. Each model in the Hallelujah gallery now has an original ritual object from that community beside it, among them prayer books, Judaica and a stained glass window made in Germany in 1919 by Friedrich Adler.

The one object of the first rank carries a caveat the museum publishes itself. Codex Sassoon is permanently displayed on the Foundations floor, and the museum notes that from time to time a replica is shown instead, subject to security, conservation and acclimatisation requirements. Anyone travelling specifically to see the original should treat that as a real possibility rather than boilerplate.

• Original: the 1967 to 1969 building shell and its lobby
• Carried over from Beit Hatfutsot: the synagogue models, restored and rehoused
• Reused: plaster replicas of Ecclesia and Synagoga, and several old dioramas, on floor 2
• Genuinely old and genuinely here: Codex Sassoon, plus ritual objects beside the models
• Everything else: made for the rebuild that opened in 2021

Codex Sassoon is the earliest near-complete copy of the Hebrew Bible. The museum dates it to the early tenth century CE on its materials and graphic features and places its production in the region of the Land of Israel and Syria. It holds all 24 books of the Tanakh, written on parchment by a single scribe, with vocalisation and cantillation marks and Masoretic notes added by two hands from different periods. It runs to 792 pages, about 92 per cent of the biblical text, and weighs about 12 kilogrammes.

Its own history is written into it. A Judeo-Arabic inscription dated to around the year 1000 records its sale from Khalaf ben Avraham to Yitzhak ben Yehezkel al-Attar, and a Hebrew inscription on the same page has the buyer declaring the book sacred unto God and cursing anyone who sells or steals it. Later inscriptions make it property of the synagogue at Makisin, identified with modern Markada in northeastern Syria, and record it being entrusted to one Salama ibn Abi al-Fakhr until that synagogue was rebuilt. It never was, and the codex disappears for some five centuries.

David Solomon Sassoon bought it in 1929 from a private owner in Ankara for £350 and gave it the shelf mark 1053 still stamped on the spine. His descendants sold it in the 1970s to the British Rail Pension Fund, which deposited it at the British Library, where it was shown publicly only once, in late 1982; in 1989 it went to Jacqui Safra of Geneva. Ambassador Alfred H. Moses bought it at Sotheby's in New York in May 2023 and gave it to ANU, and the permanent display, ready for October 2023 and delayed by the war, was inaugurated on 29 May 2025.

The Alfred H. Moses and Family Synagogue Hall shows Hallelujah! Assemble, Pray, Study, Synagogues Past and Present, curated by Amitai Achiman. Florence, Warsaw, Krakow, Fez, Cochin and Amsterdam are among the communities represented. The subject is not architecture alone but what a synagogue was used for: assembly, study, weddings, bar and bat mitzvah and charity as much as prayer.

Heroes, Trailblazers of the Jewish People, occupies the Tamar and Milton Maltz Family Gallery on the ground floor and is the one part of the museum that has to be booked. It runs on Saturdays only, in fixed 90-minute slots at 10:00, 11:45 and 13:30, and the museum states it suits children aged 6 to 12. Shoes come off at the entrance and pushchairs are not allowed in. A Heroes ticket is valid for the rest of the museum before or after the slot.

The archive is the least visible part of the institution and for some visitors the reason to come. Over more than four decades the museum has assembled family trees covering over five million individuals, with images, films, music and research into Jewish family names and community histories. The databases are free to search online, and staff will help in person in the lobby study area, Sunday to Thursday, 10:00 to 13:00.

Temporary exhibitions turn over, and one of them is not a normal museum experience. October Seventh opened on 23 February 2024 with work by 25 artists responding to the attacks of 7 October 2023 and the war that followed, some of them killed, some from the communities attacked. The museum describes it as a space of anguish, loss, anger, memory and sorrow, an accurate warning for anyone travelling with children.