ANU - Museum of the Jewish People

ANU's core holdings are reconstructions, models and digitised archives rather than an encyclopaedic object collection: 21 synagogue scale models, some representing buildings that no longer exist in any other form; genealogical, photographic, film and music databases built up over nearly four decades and searchable both on site and online; and, since 2023, one object of major independent market and scholarly value, Codex Sassoon. Museum management describes ANU as the largest Jewish museum in the world by floor area, at roughly 72,000 square feet across three main exhibition levels plus the Synagogue Hall and children's gallery.

ANU - Museum of the Jewish People occupies the same building, on the same corner of the Tel Aviv University campus, that has held a museum about Jewish life since 15 May 1978. It opened then as the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, the idea of Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, who had proposed in 1959 that young Israelis and diaspora Jews alike needed an institution telling the long, mostly ordinary history of Jewish communities abroad, not only the history of persecution. Abba Kovner, the poet and former partisan commander, wrote the concept for its first core exhibition around six recurring themes of Jewish existence: family, community, faith, culture, existence and return. Jeshajahu Weinberg was its first director.

The museum, which came to be known by its Hebrew name Beit Hatfutsot, the Diaspora House, survived a serious budget crisis in the 1980s and 1990s driven by government cuts and falling tourism, rescued in part by the former Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo Lahat and the former prime minister Ariel Sharon, and stabilised financially through a partnership between the Israeli government and the businessman Leonid Nevzlin's Nadav Foundation. In 2005 the Knesset passed a law naming it the National Center for Jewish Communities in Israel and around the world.

A first renewal opened in 2016: a new wing holding the Alfred H. Moses and Family Synagogue Hall and the Heroes children's gallery. The larger rebuild followed, a ten-year, roughly 100 million dollar project funded by the state, the Nadav Foundation and private donors, that closed the original core exhibition, tripled the museum's exhibition space to about 72,000 square feet, and reopened the whole building on 10 March 2021 under a new name and identity, ANU, Hebrew for we. Board chair Irina Nevzlin described the rebrand as intended to embrace inclusion and reflect the diversity and collective spirit of the Jewish people everywhere.

A visit starts on the third floor rather than the ground floor. Level 3, the Mosaic, opens with a room of life-size video portraits: a Hasidic woman judge from New York, a secular kibbutznik from the Negev, a Reform rabbi from Tel Aviv, a teacher from Brazil, each speaking for about a minute about what being Jewish means to them, their voices overlapping rather than in sequence. The rest of the floor moves through Jewish contribution to film, music, theatre, dance, comedy and public life, anchored by objects rather than only text: Leonard Cohen's guitar, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's judicial collar, a King Lear costume worn by the Soviet Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, and a gown by the designer Alber Elbaz.

Level 2, the Journey, is the historical spine, moving from ancient migration through the great centres of Jewish scholarship and community, through pogrom and persecution, to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Level 1, the Foundations, steps back from chronology to the ideas the museum treats as shared ground across Jewish practice: the Sabbath, the covenant, the yearly and life cycles, and the reach of the Hebrew Bible into cultures well outside Judaism. This is also where Codex Sassoon has stood since May 2025.

Outside the three main floors sit the Synagogue Hall, the ground-floor Heroes gallery for children, and a program of temporary exhibitions that in 2026 include a photography survey called 20&20: A Lens of Her Own and, since February 2024, an exhibition responding directly to the 7 October 2023 attacks and the war that followed.

Codex Sassoon is the earliest known nearly-complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, radiocarbon-dated to between 880 and 960 CE and containing almost all 24 books of the Tanakh across 792 parchment leaves. Its ownership over the following centuries is documented in inscriptions added to the manuscript itself, including a dedication consecrating it to a synagogue in Makisin, in what is now northeastern Syria, and a note from the late 14th century entrusting it to a private keeper on condition it be returned once the synagogue was rebuilt. What happened to it between then and the early 20th century is not known from any source the museum or prior scholarship has produced.

The manuscript reappeared in 1929 in private hands in Ankara, was bought by the collector David Solomon Sassoon, and passed afterward through the British Rail Pension Fund's art-investment portfolio, a 1982 exhibition at the British Library, and the collection of the Geneva-based banker Jacqui Safra, before Sotheby's sold it in New York in May 2023 for about 38.1 million dollars, bought by former US ambassador Alfred H. Moses on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated to the museum. It went on permanent display on the Foundations floor in May 2025, where visitors can view the original manuscript at close range, work through interactive stations built around its text, and watch two short films, one on the manuscript's history and one an animated piece on the Ten Commandments set to an original score by Yoni Rechter. The museum's own exhibition page states plainly that the object on view is permanent, not a loan or a temporary showing, and that a facsimile only stands in for it occasionally, for stated conservation and security reasons.

The Alfred H. Moses and Family Synagogue Hall, the first piece of the museum's renewal to open, in 2016, holds 21 scale models of synagogues drawn from the museum's long-running collection of architectural reconstructions, first assembled for the 1978 museum and expanded since. The models on view include the Great Sephardi Synagogue in Florence, the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, the Paradesi Synagogue in Cochin in southwestern India, the Eliahu Hanavi Synagogue, the Central Synagogue of Aleppo in Syria, the Great German Synagogue in Venice's Ghetto, and the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, one of only two synagogues Frank Lloyd Wright built. Alongside each model sits at least one original ritual object drawn from that community, and the hall also holds a stained-glass window made in Germany in 1919 by the artist Friedrich Adler, plus a large-scale reproduction of the third-century painted panels excavated at the ancient synagogue of Dura-Europos in Syria.

For several of these buildings the model is now the closest a visitor can get to the original: the Aleppo synagogue's community had effectively emptied by the early 2000s, and other buildings represented in the hall have been destroyed, converted or altered beyond recognition since they were built. The hall pairs this with interactive touchscreens for building a synagogue from its component parts and a listening station of recorded liturgical music from Jewish communities across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The renovated museum drew serious critical attention from Jewish literary and review publications when it reopened in 2021, and the critics broadly agree on what changed. Sarah Rindner, writing in the Jewish Review of Books, contrasted the old Beit Hatfutsot's 1970s-era comic family-tree illustrations, its realistic synagogue reconstructions and its dramatic multi-floor Yizkor memorial to victims of antisemitism, all now gone or repositioned, with a museum that begins in the present and moves backward, downplaying oppression in favour of Jewish agency and cultural contribution. She called it a cheery, inclusive vision of Jewish peoplehood, more lighthearted than its predecessor, though she wondered whether some of its very contemporary references would age the way the old building's decor eventually had.

Izabella Tabarovsky, writing for Tablet Magazine, described a museum proposing a vision of togetherness she called fresh, bold and inclusive at what she characterised as a moment of unusual division in the Jewish world, pointing to the interactive kitchen exhibit and the video-portrait installation as evidence of a curatorial approach built around personal representation before shared narrative.

Yaniv Feller, writing in the Tel Aviv Review of Books, took the most critical line without disputing the quality of the execution. He argued that a museum built around a pluralistic, multi-denominational, explicitly inclusive account of what it means to be Jewish sits uneasily inside an Israeli political environment where religious-nationalist parties holding a substantial bloc of Knesset seats reject the legitimacy of the non-Orthodox streams the museum treats as equally valid, and he suggested the museum's vision reads as aspirational rather than descriptive of the society actually surrounding it.

The renewed museum was funded jointly by the State of Israel, the Nadav Foundation established by the businessman Leonid Nevzlin, and private philanthropy, a structure that dates back to the recovery plan that saved the institution from its 1990s budget crisis. Irina Nevzlin, Leonid Nevzlin's daughter, chairs the museum's board; Alfred H. Moses, who funded the Codex Sassoon purchase, and the retired general Eitan Ben Eliyahu serve as co-chairs of its Board of Governors. None of this is hidden. The museum's own about page names its funders and leadership plainly, and the Codex Sassoon exhibition page states the acquisition price and the donor's name without qualification.

What remains an open argument, made by critics rather than resolved by the museum, is whether an institution funded substantially by the Israeli state and describing itself as the National Center for Jewish Communities can also present, without friction, a version of Jewish identity that includes streams of practice a meaningful share of Israel's own political establishment does not recognise as fully legitimate. The museum's design answers this by inclusion rather than argument, placing a Haredi man and a lesbian Reform rabbi in the same room of video portraits without ranking them. Whether that constitutes an answer or a postponement of the question is exactly where the published criticism of the museum, cited above, divides.

Visitors consistently describe the design and production values of the renovated museum as unusually high for the genre, praising how much of the four thousand year story it manages to cover through interactive stations, film and object display rather than text panels alone, and several describe an unexpected personal or emotional connection to family history. The most common practical complaints are that the museum shop is expensive and only loosely tied to the exhibitions, that guided-tour quality varies because some tours are run by volunteers rather than staff guides, and that two to three hours, the museum's own estimate, is not enough time to see the three main floors, the Synagogue Hall and any temporary exhibition properly. Critics writing for Jewish literary and review publications in 2021, when the renovated museum opened, largely agree on what ANU is trying to do: replace the old Beit Hatfutsot's chronological, tragedy-inclusive account of Diaspora history with a lighter, more pluralistic and more contemporary-facing story centred on identity. Where they differ is on whether that trade avoids something, and on whether a museum built around inclusion sits easily inside Israel's own religious and political arguments about who counts as Jewish.