Rockefeller Museum

The Rockefeller's strength is exactly the material Breasted set out to keep in the country: excavation finds from Mandate-era digs across Palestine that were never divided and shipped abroad, arranged chronologically from the Paleolithic and Neolithic through the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Classical, Byzantine, Crusader and Islamic periods, and into the Ottoman era. Two holdings set it apart from any other collection of the region's archaeology. It has the largest surviving body of decorative stucco and stonework removed from Hisham's Palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar near Jericho, the single richest site of early Islamic Umayyad ornament in the Levant, and it holds the material record, in wood, stone and gold, of a British-run excavation programme across sites including Megiddo, Lachish, Samaria and Beit She'an that shaped how the whole region's ancient chronology was first written.

The idea began with an American Egyptologist. James Henry Breasted, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, visited Mandatory Palestine in 1925 and judged that the country needed a proper museum of its own archaeology rather than continuing to see its finds shipped abroad for display, the practice that had filled European collections for a century. Breasted approached the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., who agreed to fund the building outright with a gift of two million dollars. Rockefeller himself never visited the finished museum.

The British Mandate government chose a hillside site just outside the Old City walls, at the corner where the Via Dolorosa meets Sultan Suleiman Street, and laid the cornerstone on 19 June 1930 in a ceremony attended by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, among other local dignitaries. Construction ran slower than planned once builders uncovered fifth-century BCE tombs on the site that had to be excavated before work could continue. The British architect Austen St Barbe Harrison designed a white limestone building that set Eastern and Western forms side by side rather than favouring one; the sculptor Eric Gill carved ten stone relief panels for the entrance depicting successive civilisations of the region and cut the trilingual English, Hebrew and Arabic lettering that still runs through the building. The Palestine Archaeological Museum, as it was then named, opened to the public on 13 January 1938, an occasion overshadowed by the murder of the British archaeologist James Leslie Starkey on his way to the opening ceremony.

The museum stands on a site with its own, older history that the building's later signage has not always acknowledged. The property was known as Karm al-Sheikh, and part of it had been the eighteenth-century manor of Sheikh Muhammad al-Khalili, an Islamic scholar and mufti; the British Mandate authorities purchased the land from the Khalili family before construction began. The Palestinian anthropologist Ali Qleibo, who traces his descent to al-Khalili, argues, as Jerusalem Story records, that the matter is one of restitution and family history rather than politics: the museum administration's own offices, on his account, occupy what was once his family's house, and no plaque or display inside credits that ownership. Qleibo's demand is narrow and specific, that the building's history before 1930 be named on the site itself, not that the museum close or the collection move.

Jerusalem Story also records that Israeli authorities raised the Israeli flag at the museum's entrances after 1967 and renamed it for its American donor rather than for its Ottoman and Mandate history, a choice that, in East Jerusalem, reads to Palestinian visitors as a claim of ownership the building's own location does not straightforwardly support. Neither side disputes the underlying facts; what is unsettled is whether that history belongs on a wall inside a museum that receives visitors from across the world, and the museum's own current operators, a coalition of the Tower of David Museum, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Museum, have not added it.

The British Mandate government ran the museum until the Mandate itself ended in 1948, at which point, per the founding trust deed, an international board of twelve trustees was appointed on 20 April 1948 specifically so the collection would not fall under the control of any single successor government, a precaution drawn directly from the political uncertainty of the moment. Jordan, which held East Jerusalem and the West Bank after the 1948 war, administered the site under that trustee structure until 1966, when King Hussein nationalised the museum outright as part of a wider assertion of Jordanian sovereignty over the annexed territory.

That arrangement lasted less than a year. During the Six-Day War in June 1967 an Israeli paratroop brigade captured the museum, using its hexagonal tower, the tallest structure on that stretch of the old city wall, as a lookout point during the fighting for East Jerusalem. Israel folded the museum's administration into the Israel Museum, which it had opened in West Jerusalem four years earlier, and the building became, and remained for decades, the head office of the Israel Antiquities Authority as well as a public museum. The building's Mandate-era name, the Palestine Archaeological Museum, dropped out of official use; the donor's name, already the informal one in English since 1938, became the only one used.

From their discovery beginning in 1947 until 1967, the Rockefeller housed the single most consequential archive to pass through its rooms, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and its own library and reading room were where early fragments were laid out, matched and first deciphered by the international team working under the Mandate and then Jordanian administration. After the 1967 war Israel moved the core of the collection across the city to the purpose-built Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, while part of the wider find, including the Copper Scroll, had already gone to the Jordan Museum in Amman during the Jordanian period. Ownership of the scrolls has been contested ever since between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, and no international body has settled it.

The same custody question resurfaced in a different form in January 2024, when the Israel Antiquities Authority's director, Eli Eskozido, shared footage of antiquities removed from Gaza during the war that began in October 2023, an act Jerusalem Story reports as a breach of international law on moving cultural property out of occupied territory; the IAA stated at the time that it had no intention of transferring those Gaza finds to the Rockefeller. The museum that Breasted proposed to keep excavated material inside the country rather than see it shipped abroad has spent much of its history instead adjudicating exactly which authority inside the country gets to hold it.

The Rockefeller closed to the general public in the second half of 2023; the Israel Antiquities Authority relocated its headquarters staff out of the building around the same time, and the war that began that October kept the site shut for what the museum's own current tour listing calls nearly two years. It reopened in July 2025, but not to walk-in visitors. Access today is by a paid, guided tour only, organized by the Tower of David Museum together with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Israel Museum; there is no public entrance in use and no parking at the site itself. Visitors instead meet a shuttle at the Nahal Tsofim car park beside the Givat Hamivtar light-rail stop, are driven to the museum and back on a fixed schedule, and are told plainly by the organizers that arriving independently, on foot or by private car, will not get them in.

A Tripadvisor review written in October 2025, after the reopening, is candid about what that visit now shows: the guide told the reviewer's group that the display is limited because the exhibits collected decades ago are, in places, no longer in position, and that funding for the museum's own maintenance has lapsed, so the current display cannot represent the full archaeological record the collection holds. The building's future is, as of this writing, genuinely undecided. Haaretz reported in September 2025 that an interministerial committee was weighing competing plans for the site, ranging from continued heritage use under the Tower of David or the Antiquities Authority to conversion into a hotel, and that Elad, a settler organization active at archaeological sites across East Jerusalem, has also been named as a possible operator; the Israeli heritage watchdog Emek Shaveh has publicly opposed handing the building to Elad.

Harrison designed the Rockefeller as a hexagon built around two diagonal wings, one holding the library and reading room, the other an auditorium, so the plan reads clearly from the air or from the entrance path alike. The exterior is faced in pale Jerusalem limestone and combines round-arched Mediterranean forms with Islamic geometric ornament and Turkish walnut doors, a deliberate mixing of regional traditions rather than a European style dropped onto a Jerusalem hillside. At the centre sits Harrison's courtyard, an arcaded space built around a sunken reflecting pool and lined with Armenian ceramic tiles whose blue and green glazes echo the courts of the Alhambra in Granada, a comparison visitors and critics have drawn since the building opened. An ancient pine tree stood in what became the rear courtyard for close to three hundred years, tied by local Arab legend to the scribe Ezra, until it died in 1998.

Across more than a decade of visitor reviews the same two things recur: the building itself, especially Harrison's tiled inner courtyard, is consistently called the best part of the visit, and the collection is praised as a manageable, well-labelled walk through the whole span of the region's archaeology rather than an overwhelming one. Since the July 2025 reopening as a guided, shuttle-only tour, reviewers have added a third, more mixed note: the visit is no longer free or self-paced, and the guides themselves tell visitors that reduced maintenance funding means only part of the historic collection is currently on view.