Anu: Museum of the Jewish People

Anu: Museum of the Jewish People, known as Beit Hatfutsot until early 2021, is a cultural, educational and commemorative institution devoted to telling the story of the Jewish people across millennia and around the world. Located on the Tel Aviv University campus, the museum presents Jewish life not simply as a sequence of historical events, but as a living and diverse culture shaped by families and communities, traditions, languages, migration, persecution, creativity, survival and renewal.

The institution’s distinctive strength lies in the way it combines exhibitions, open databases, education and public engagement. It gives Jews in Israel and the Diaspora ways to encounter a shared inheritance while offering visitors from every background a fuller understanding of Jewish life and its contributions to the wider world. In this sense, Anu serves as a bridge between generations and between communities separated by geography and history.

From the idea of Beit Hatfutsot to a national museum

The idea of creating an Israeli institution that would express the connection between Israel and Jewish communities worldwide emerged in the late 1950s. In 1959, the plenary assembly of the World Jewish Congress, meeting in Stockholm, resolved to establish an institution named for Dr. Nahum Goldmann, the Congress’s founder and president. Goldmann envisioned a museum that would preserve the memory of the Jewish world destroyed in the Holocaust while showing younger Israelis the vitality, creativity and historical significance of Jewish life in the Diaspora.

The foundation stone was laid on October 20, 1966, in the presence of Israel’s President Zalman Shazar, Tel Aviv University president George Wise, Nahum Goldmann and Tel Aviv mayor Mordechai Namir. Construction and planning continued for nearly two decades. The poet Abba Kovner developed the central concept for the permanent display, organized around six thematic gateways and designed to convey the memory of Jewish communities, the richness of their lives and their struggle to survive. Yishayahu “Shayke” Weinberg led the founding team and became the museum’s first director; historian Dr. Eli Ben-Gal helped plan and establish the museum and served as its chief historian for two decades; and architect Yitzhak Yashar designed the building.

Beit Hatfutsot opened in May 1978 and was considered one of the world’s most innovative museums of its time. Rather than relying primarily on original artifacts, it used reconstructions and advanced interpretive methods, including pioneering applications of computer technology. In 2005, the Knesset passed the Beit Hatfutsot Law, defining the institution as the “National Center for Jewish Communities in Israel and the World” and recognizing its public and national importance.

Exhibitions that give the Jewish story form and meaning

The museum’s central subject is the story of the Jewish people. Its exhibitions explore the lives of women and men, children and adults, families and communities, and the ways Jewish traditions and practices developed in different lands over many centuries. They present Jewish spiritual and artistic creativity, relationships among communities, experiences of migration and persecution, and the capacity of Jewish communities to preserve identity while continually reshaping it.

After roughly a decade of planning and reconstruction, the museum reopened to the public in March 2021 under the name Anu: Museum of the Jewish People. The museum expanded to approximately 7,000 square meters, with three additional floors and four new sections. The short name, easily pronounced in many languages, was chosen to reflect the range of identities within the Jewish people and the shared sense of belonging the museum seeks to create.

The four exhibition galleries

Mosaic presents contemporary Jewish identity and culture through folklore, art, language and literature, as well as through Jewish contributions to human civilization.

Journey traces Jewish history from antiquity to the present through migration, Jewish centers, cultural creativity, persecution, renewal, the establishment of Israel and contemporary communities.

Foundations explores shared elements of Jewish life, including Shabbat, covenant, the Jewish year and life-cycle events, while also examining the Bible and its influence on cultures around the world.

Hall of Synagogues presents 21 models of synagogues from different periods and communities, together with ritual and original objects connected to the buildings and the communities they represent. The models include synagogues in Florence, Venice, Warsaw, Kaifeng, Toledo and Prague’s Old-New Synagogue. Together they show how a building can preserve the memory of an entire community, even when that community has changed or disappeared.

Open databases: documenting families, communities and creativity

Over more than three decades, Beit Hatfutsot assembled five major information resources: family trees and genealogical charts, family names, Jewish communities, visual documentation and Jewish music. In 2016, the databases became available online and free of charge. Beit Hatfutsot was also the first museum in Israel to provide open access to information through an API.

The visual archive includes photographs, documentary films and amateur films, with records of Jewish life dating from the 1920s onward. Alongside historical material, it includes films being produced in Israel and elsewhere today. These resources allow researchers, students, families and the general public to follow changes in community life, encounter vanished worlds and observe the interaction between tradition and modernity. The family and surname databases help individuals investigate their roots, while the community and music collections preserve memories that are not always available in official records.

Education, identity and encounters among communities

The museum’s School for Jewish Peoplehood Education develops programs for Israel and the Diaspora that combine knowledge with experience. Its audiences include children and adults, school pupils, university students, soldiers, teachers and other educators. Programs address Jewish identity and are adapted to the museum’s exhibitions and to the backgrounds of participants.

Alongside organized museum visits, Anu offers tours, seminars, professional development for educators, workshops and public programs with specialists in cinema, art, folklore and literature. These activities invite participants not merely to absorb information, but to consider how communities are formed, how memory passes between generations and what Jewish belonging can mean in a diverse world.

Cinema workshops draw on the Center for Visual Documentation, whose collection includes rare documentaries and amateur films. Participants learn to read film as both historical evidence and testimony, to recognize the period in which it was made and to explore the relationship between cinema, history, identity and memory. The workshops serve schools, teachers, educators, the Israel Defense Forces and the general public.

Collections, music and Jewish creativity

The museum holds approximately 600 objects connected with Jewish art and creativity. Items presented in its collections include Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, guitars associated with Leonard Bernstein and Gene Simmons, born Chaim Witz, the collar of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s judicial robe, the typewriter of Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, the original screenplay of the Israeli film Giv'at Halfon Eina Ona and Naomi Shemer’s handwritten manuscript for the song “Lu Yehi.” Such objects expand the meaning of Jewish heritage, showing Jewish influence in music, cinema, law, literature and popular culture.

In 2000, Beit Hatfutsot released the recording Like Lead in the Sky, featuring works by Jewish, Israeli and Czech composers inspired by the memory of the Theresienstadt ghetto. The program included Haim Permont’s “Lead Skies,” Ben-Zion Orgad’s “Personal Place,” Erwin Schulhoff’s Concertino and works by Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann and Reuven Seroussi. Performers included Mira Zakai, Jonathan Zak, the Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon LeZion, the Meitar Ensemble and the United Choir, conducted by Avner Itai, Itay Talgam and Leonti Wolf. The project connected historical memory with contemporary performance, turning commemoration into a living cultural experience.

Rescue, renewal and public responsibility

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Beit Hatfutsot faced a serious crisis caused by continuing reductions in government support, a sharp decline in visitors during the Second Intifada, a shortage of donations and an aging exhibition. By the summer of 2003, the museum was at risk of closure. Public figures, led by former Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo “Chich” Lahat, mobilized to save it. In early 2004, a four-million-dollar rescue package was assembled through a partnership among the Government of Israel, philanthropist Leonid Nevzlin through the Nadav Foundation and the Claims Conference.

The rescue effort also led to the Beit Hatfutsot Law, approved on December 6, 2005, which defined the museum as the national center for Jewish communities in Israel and around the world. A new international board of trustees brought together Israeli public figures and leaders of Jewish communities abroad. With support from the Nadav Foundation, a long-term development plan was created to transform the museum into a modern, innovative global center for Jewish experience. The International School for Jewish Peoplehood Studies was established as part of this process.

The museum is organized as a public-benefit company within a partnership involving the Government of Israel, Tel Aviv University, the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress. Between 2008 and 2010, its entrance level and public facilities were expanded, adding a new lobby, exhibition spaces, an auditorium, a café, a larger shop and a children’s activity area. These improvements created a stronger setting for families, students, researchers and visitors from around the world to encounter the Jewish story.

Why Anu: Museum of the Jewish People belongs in Moreshet

Anu merits inclusion in Moreshet because it is not simply a museum about Jewish people; it is an institution through which the Jewish people document themselves, study their history and meet around a shared but diverse story. For decades, it has gathered evidence about families, communities, music, images and films, making much of that material accessible to the public in Israel and around the world. It gives individuals a way to locate their own family and community histories within a wider Jewish narrative.

The institution’s influence is equally visible in education. Students, teachers, soldiers, university students and adult visitors encounter Judaism as a many-sided culture and as a network of communities, rather than merely as a subject in a history textbook. Its exhibitions, databases and educational programs strengthen memory, belonging and dialogue between Israel and the Diaspora. By presenting Jewish creativity and contribution to the wider world, they also invite non-Jewish visitors to approach Jewish history with knowledge, curiosity and empathy.

For these reasons, Moreshet.com records Anu as a major institution in the life and heritage of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. It began with the need to remember a Jewish world devastated by the Holocaust, renewed itself to represent living communities in the present and continues to create tools through which future generations can understand the past and imagine their shared future.