MUZA – Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, one of the three largest and most pre-eminent museums in Israel, is a multidisciplinary museum dealing with local material culture, past and present. The museum displays the connection between matter and spirit, and presents Israel’s many and varied voices. The museum’s new spirit aims to create contemporary connections between the different cultural domains that the museum is involved with – archaeology, ethnography, applied crafts, art, photography, and documentation of Israeli society – and expand them.
There are hundreds of thousands of items in the museum’s collection, including many rare and unique treasures. The museum also has a collection of photographs from the history of photography in Israel, including iconic photos. Alongside the permanent displays of the ancient material culture collections, the museum mounts temporary exhibitions of crafts, art, photography and more.
For the last two decades the museum has held Biennales focusing on contemporary creativity in specific materials, such as glass, ceramics, and more. In the Tel Aviv Biennale of Crafts and Design, an innovative museal event launched in 2020, different fields of craft and design are combined for the first time into a single exhibition, scattered through different spaces throughout the museum, in dialog with the permanent displays exhibited in various external locations and gardens.
At the heart of the museum, on a tall hill overlooking the urban landscape, stands Tell Qasile, one of the most fascinating and important archaeological sites to be excavated in the Tel Aviv area, including the remains of an ancient Philistine city. In the archaeological park remains of other cultures and communities have been discovered from 3000 years ago up to the present. Throughout the museum’s garden and between the paths that invite the visitor to a pleasant and exhilarating urban stroll, can be found mosaics brought from different sites, ancient wine-presses, and a restored olive oil plant and flour mill.
As well as the wealth of permanent exhibitions, temporary exhibitions and ancient sites, the museum site includes a functioning planetarium, and the museum also hosts additional cultural institutions such as “The Cathedra Center for Experiential Learning and Lectures”, plays, concerts, and more. All these together create the complete unique experience of a visit to MUZA, Eretz Israel Museum, and attract a wide and varied spectrum of visitors.
