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$6 Million for Tel Aviv Diaspora Museum

This time, to teach Israels about Jews elsewhere

by
Ari M. Brostoff
September 29, 2009

Tel Aviv is home to the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, but museumgoers there must be foreigners, because, says the Jerusalem Post, “according to experts, most Israeli youth pass through the state education system without a single lesson on the Diaspora.” That’s why a Russian-Israeli billionaire, Leonid Nevzlin, gave the museum a $6 million grant last week to help fund an offshoot, the Museum of the Jewish People, scheduled to open in 2012 and designed to convey to Israelis the value of Jewish life outside its borders. The new museum has a big task ahead of it: “More than 60 percent of the 150 history and civics teachers polled said the subject of Diaspora Jewry had never entered their classrooms, according to a 2006 study by the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East Office,” the Post report said. “Only 13 percent said they had taught it or heard of it being taught at least once.”

Ari M. Brostoff is Culture Editor at Jewish Currents.