Eretz Israel Museum

Moses set out more than a bequest. In his will he named the museum and fixed its purpose: it was to stand in Tel Aviv, become a cultural and academic institution of international standing, teach adults and children, and make archaeology and folklore part of contemporary culture rather than a specialism. His collection was valued in the 1952 contract at over a million dollars. He died suddenly in 1955 and never saw any of it built.

The dates around the founding do not line up cleanly, and it is worth saying so. The museum's own history gives 1958 as the year it was founded, with the Glass Pavilion the first to be dedicated, in 1959. The English-language Wikipedia article dates the institution's establishment to 1953, the year after the contract with the municipality was signed. The two accounts are probably describing different events, the transfer of a collection and the opening of a museum, rather than contradicting each other outright, but no single published date covers both.

The site itself carries a second history. The English Wikipedia article on the museum records that it was established on the site of the depopulated Palestinian village of al-Shaykh Muwannis, whose villagers left in March 1948 after a period of intimidation, and much of whose land is now occupied by Tel Aviv University immediately to the north. The museum's own account of its site does not mention the village; it explains the choice of ground by the tell and the view over the city.

The name has moved twice. It opened as the Haaretz Museum, was renamed the Eretz Israel Museum in 1983, and was rebranded MUZA in 2015, which is why maps, signs and tickets do not all agree. One further episode appears only in the Wikipedia account: Rehavam Ze'evi directed the museum from 1981 to 1989 and chaired it to 1994, the city put eleven million dollars into new buildings during that period, and construction damaged a Byzantine mosaic. The museum's own history passes over it.

The mound came before the museum. In the 1940s two potsherds carrying Hebrew inscriptions were picked up on the surface of the tell, not dug out of it. One of them reads, in the standard rendering, gold of Ophir for Beth Horon, thirty shekels, which is the only ancient reference to Ophir yet found outside the biblical text; the other is a receipt for oil issued for the king. On the museum's own account it was the interest those sherds attracted that led, in 1948, to the newly established State of Israel issuing its first excavation permit for this site.

Digging began in October 1948 under Benjamin Maisler, later Mazar, and continued through 1949 and 1950. Amihai Mazar led the later campaigns, from 1971 to 1974 and again from 1982 into the early 1990s, and it was those seasons that opened the sacred complex on the summit. Twelve layers of settlement have been distinguished. The museum describes the community they represent as small, carefully planned and busy across roughly 150 years.

What was found on top is a precinct of three temples built one above another, in sun-dried mud brick faced with plaster, with low benches running along the walls. A smaller temple stands beside the central one, possibly for a priest's own use or for a secondary god. In the courtyard there was an altar ringed with layers of ash and animal bone: sheep, goat, cattle, hippopotamus and camel, presumably sacrificed and then eaten. Later laboratory work on the material has identified cinnamon used to flavour wine, cedar imported for columns, and pigment on the temple walls.

The identity of the people who built it is the part most guidebooks settle too quickly. The pottery has Aegean and Cypriot traits, which is the basis for calling Qasile the northernmost Philistine centre yet found, and that is how the site is usually labelled. The museum itself will not go that far. Its own text calls the inhabitants' identity one of the principal questions still open, and argues that the settlement's history is probably more complex than one label: a local population that absorbed forms and technologies from around the Mediterranean rather than a transplanted one.

The museum is unusually clear about the difference, and a visitor who reads the labels will not be confused. The tell is real ground and the excavated walls on it are the excavated walls. The mosaic in the Mosaic Square from a sixth-century Samaritan house of prayer is displayed in situ, where it was found, which the museum explains as a deliberate policy of leaving what is discovered inside its boundaries in place. Only about a third of that floor survives, carrying three inscriptions in Greek and Samaritan, one of them a blessing formula common in Jewish synagogues and appearing here, the museum says, in a Samaritan building for the first time.

The rest of the mosaics were brought in from elsewhere and are exhibits rather than remains: a floor found at Beit Guvrin in 1921, a sixth to eighth century synagogue floor from Tiberias with a Greek dedication to Proclus son of Crispus, two panels from a private Muslim prayer house at Ramla of the eighth century, and fragments from the church at Sukhmata in the Galilee. The third panel from the Ramla building, the one with the prayer niche and a Quranic verse, is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and not here.

The olive press complex and the flour mill are reconstructions, and are described as such. The Iron Age press in the southern courtyard reconstructs one of the eighth to seventh centuries BCE from Tell Batash, with a crushing basin and two weighted-beam extraction presses. The traditional Arab press in the northern wing uses a beam brought from Iksal in the Galilee that the museum calls one of the largest known in the country, and the southern wing holds the iron equipment that replaced it from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The flour mill below the tell was reconstructed from the water-powered mills of northern Israel, and the museum notes what those mills meant socially: 30 to 50 kilogrammes of flour an hour against the single kilogramme a hand mill managed, a miller taking a tenth as his fee, and a queue that worked as a village meeting.

Yael Garden holds the best single object outdoors. The Bird Mosaic from Beit Guvrin, made in the sixth century, has vine tendrils rising from an amphora into eight medallions of birds and deer, and a Greek inscription naming Obodianus, a priest, as the man who paid for it. About a third has been lost. The Israel Antiquities Authority and UNESCO restored it as part of a wider project.

• Original: the tell and its excavated walls, and the Samaritan prayer-house mosaic left where it was found
• Moved here: the mosaics from Beit Guvrin, Tiberias, Ramla and Sukhmata
• Reconstructed: the Iron Age olive press after one from Tell Batash, and the water-powered flour mill
• Reused originals inside a reconstruction: the press beam from Iksal and the nineteenth-century iron equipment
• Restored: the Bird Mosaic, by the Israel Antiquities Authority with UNESCO

The original buildings were designed by Werner Joseph Wittkower and are now listed. Each was planned for its own collection, which is why they do not match: the museum's stated idea was that the structure should reflect the narrative of what it holds. They were dedicated over half a century, in the order the museum gives: Glass in 1959, the Kadman Numismatic Pavilion in 1962, Ethnographic and Folklore in 1963, Ceramics in 1966, the Man and His Work Center in 1982, the Nehushtan Pavilion in 1983, the Alexander Pavilion of Postal History and Philately in 1998, and the Rothschild Center in 2006.

The Ceramics Pavilion is where the tell and the collections meet. Some of the rare offering and cult vessels lifted from the temples on the summit are displayed there, so the excavated precinct outside and the objects that came out of it can be seen in the same visit, which is not usually possible at an Israeli site of this age. The Kadman Numismatic Pavilion covers coinage, the Glass Pavilion the collection the whole museum grew from, and the Nehushtan Pavilion copper and its working.

The Jewish Culture and Folklore Pavilion sits in a historic building in the middle of the park and reopened in June 2024 after the building and its displays were rebuilt. The museum calls the Judaica, ethnography and folklore collection held there one of the largest in Israel. Photography is the other strength: the House of Photography is a departmental project building a digital lexicon of Israeli photography, and the annual Local Testimony exhibition of Israeli photojournalism runs here each winter.

Displays close and move more than at most museums, because the pavilions double as venues for the Tel Aviv Biennale of Crafts and Design. At the time of writing the museum's exhibitions page flags the ketubot display as temporarily closed for the Biennale and the philately display on the Alexander Pavilion's lower level as temporarily closed as well. Checking that page the morning of a visit is the difference between seeing a collection and reading a notice about it.

• The Ceramics Pavilion, holding cult vessels excavated from the Tel Qasile temples
• The Glass Pavilion, the Walter Moses collection the museum was founded to house
• The Kadman Numismatic Pavilion, coins and minting
• The Nehushtan Pavilion, copper
• The Man and His Work Center, ancient crafts and the tools that made them
• The Jewish Culture and Folklore Pavilion, reopened June 2024
• The Alexander Pavilion of Postal History and Philately
• The House of Photography

The planetarium opened to the public in May 1968, paid for by Harry and Sadie Lasky of Chicago, and it is the reason a good many Israeli schoolchildren have been here at least once. It runs two shows: Stars, a tour of the sky and the life cycle of stars, and Astronaut, on how astronauts train and what NASA trains them with. The museum recommends both from age five.

It is a separate transaction. Ordinary museum admission does not cover the planetarium; the museum sells a combined entry and activity ticket, and prices a child's planetarium seat at NIS 30. Hebrew is the working language. Screenings in English are offered on Saturdays at 13:30 and otherwise need booking in advance with a minimum number of participants, so a family turning up on a Tuesday expecting an English show will not get one.

Show times are concentrated at the weekend and in the school holidays: several Saturday screenings, one on the last Thursday of the month at 17:00, and extra Tuesday and Thursday screenings through July and August. The full current list is on the museum's planetarium page, and it changes with the school calendar.

The largest change here in decades is not an exhibition. The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel MUZA Park opened its first 50,000 square metres on 21 September 2023 and was completed in July 2024, giving 90,000 square metres of free public ground on a budget the museum puts at 74 million shekels. Boundary fences came down, five gates were opened around the perimeter, and the park now holds the pond, the reconstructed olive press and flour mill, Sundial Square, the planetarium and a scatter of archaeological exhibits, with paths, shade, drinking fountains and two toilet buildings.

The master plan behind it was chosen from a competition of seven firms and is the work of Kimmel Eshkolot with Studio de Lange. The next piece is a central building spanning the site, which the museum describes as about 7,000 square metres adding roughly 4,000 square metres of exhibition space, costed at about 120 million shekels and estimated at around four years from completion. A city square is planned on the Haim Levanon Street side to connect the campus to the Ramat Aviv HaYeruka neighbourhood.

The museum is explicit about what it wants from this: a place among Israel's top three museums, and between half a million and a million visitors a year. Both figures are stated as targets in the renewal documents rather than as counts, and the museum does not publish a current annual attendance figure beside them. What is already true is that the free park has changed who walks through the gates, because a resident of north Tel Aviv can now cross the grounds on the way somewhere else.