Moshe Novomeisky Visitor Center

Palestine Potash already had a works at the northern end of the lake when it ran out of space there. The southern basin was shallow, hot and empty, which made it close to ideal for the solar evaporation ponds the process needs and close to unliveable for the people who would tend them. On 1 May 1934 a first group of about twenty workers sailed down the lake to start building, and the camp they raised at the foot of Mount Sodom is the ground the visitor centre stands on.

The early arrangements were improvised to the point of absurdity. A cave in the salt mountain, known as Colonel's Cave after Thomas Gregory Tulloch, the British engineer who held the concession jointly with Novomeisky and oversaw construction of the southern plant, was enlarged and fitted out as worker housing. A power station, a small port and a narrow railway followed, the railway running the six kilometres between camp and plant and carrying both the workers and the potash down to the loading dock. A cinema arrived later, which in this landscape counted as infrastructure rather than luxury.

The population figures give the pace. Roughly thirty people lived here in 1934; by 1938 there were about 650, of whom some 380 belonged to a kibbutz labour brigade. The plant was standing in 1936 and made its first potash shipment in 1937, and it quickly overtook the older works in the north: before 1948 the southern plant accounted for something like 80 per cent of the company's combined potash output.

By the standards of the country at the time this was an enormous business. Potash made up around half of Palestine's industrial exports by 1940. In 1945 the company sold 90,040 tonnes of potash and 347 tonnes of bromine. The operator's own chronology records output passing 100,000 tonnes a year in 1941, the figure the concession letter had demanded of it.

Moshe Novomeisky was born on 25 November 1873 in Barguzin, a village near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia, and took a mining engineering degree at Königsberg in 1897. He worked Siberian gold and mineral lakes, headed the National Council of Siberian Jews and the regional Zionist organisation during the revolution, and left when the Bolsheviks took power, settling in Palestine in 1920. He had first travelled to look at the Dead Sea in 1911.

Prising a concession out of the British took the rest of the decade. He applied in 1921. A public tender went out in May 1925 and drew five bids, three of which were shortlisted; the operator's chronology notes that Novomeisky's proposal was the strongest technically and the weakest financially. The Colonial Office rejected every bid in 1926. On 9 April 1927 the High Commissioner, Lord Plumer, agreed in principle to a concession for Novomeisky and Tulloch provided they could produce satisfactory financial guarantees, and in 1928 the House of Lords argued bitterly over granting it to a Jew at all.

Palestine Potash Ltd was incorporated on 23 October 1929, with Lord Lytton as chairman and a board of eleven: six British subjects, four Americans and Novomeisky himself. The concession took effect on 1 January 1930, ran seventy-five years to the end of 2004, and obliged the company to pay five per cent of sales value in royalties to the Mandate and Transjordan governments on top of annual fees and taxes.

He did not keep it. The Israeli government decided in December 1951 to nationalise the company and bought its assets in July 1952, when he was seventy-eight; the operator's own timeline dates the change to June 1952, and the difference of a month or so is not resolved by anything published here. The successor took the name Dead Sea Works. Novomeisky wrote two memoirs, My Siberian Life and Given to Salt, died in Paris on 27 March 1961 and is buried in the Trumpeldor cemetery in Tel Aviv.

The United Nations partition resolution of 29 November 1947 placed the northern Dead Sea, and with it the company's original works, inside the proposed Arab state. Fighting began the next day, and the convoys carrying potash up to Jerusalem came under fire. Levi Spiegelman, who had commanded the Haganah at Sdom for some eleven years, was badly wounded in one of those convoys in December 1947 and later died of his injuries.

His replacement, Goel Levitsky, took command in January 1948. On 18 May a delegation from the high command arrived and ordered him to surrender to the Arab Legion. He went over their heads to David Ben-Gurion, asked permission to stay and fight, was given it, and from 20 May commanded roughly 700 people in the camp: the Sdom workforce plus those evacuated from the northern works and from Kibbutz Beit HaArava on the night of 19 to 20 May. He was recommended for a citation for it.

The northern plant was looted and destroyed within days, though accounts differ on exactly when. The English-language record has the Arab Legion entering the site on 22 May; the operator's chronology puts the destruction at the end of the month. Work at Sdom stopped, a small group under Moshe Langotsky stayed to keep the plant alive, the water pipeline from A-Safi was cut and water had to be brought in by boat from the north, and from June supplies arrived by air. Land contact was restored on 25 November 1948, when the Palmach reached Sdom in Operation Lot and the siege lifted.

That eleven-month episode is the emotional centre of the tour, and it also explains why a chemicals company built a museum here at all. The camp is presented as a piece of the founding of the state rather than as a disused industrial compound, and the exhibition is arranged to land on it.

The buildings are real and have been worked on for a long time. The Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel says it was part of the rehabilitation of the workers' camp from decades before the visitor centre existed, sat on the steering committee that created it, and invested millions of shekels in the site. Its work covered the old dining hall, the administration building known as the mud house, and the security house, along with the locomotives, carriages and track that served the plant through the 1930s and 1940s. The Tamar Regional Council carried the planning permissions and the road junction.

The interpretation inside those buildings is entirely new. The tour opens in a hall built around a large model of the Dead Sea showing how the rift formed; it moves into the restored dining hall, where Novomeisky is introduced; a virtual reality sequence puts the visitor inside the camp at its height, walking among its workers; a further section covers the War of Independence; and the visit closes on what Dead Sea minerals are used for now and on what the operator itself calls the dilemma between conservation and development.

So the honest description is a restored and partly reconstructed camp with a modern exhibition installed in it, presented by the company that owns the successor plant. That is not a criticism of the fabric, which is genuine and was rescued rather than invented, but it does mean a visitor should not expect to find rooms left as their occupants left them.

The working potash plant is not part of the visit and cannot be toured. Nor is Mount Sodom, although the camp sits at its foot and the eighty-metre shaft of Colonel's Cave, named for Novomeisky's British partner, lies on a marked trail on the mountain above.

• Original fabric, conserved: the dining hall, the administration building known as the mud house, and the security house
• Original rolling stock, restored: the locomotives, carriages and track that served the plant in the 1930s and 1940s
• Entirely new: the Dead Sea model hall, the virtual reality sequence and every display screen
• Not included in the ticket: the working Dead Sea Works plant, which is a live industrial site
• Not on the site at all: Colonel's Cave, a shaft on Mount Sodom above the camp

Every visit is a guided tour, and the operator states that the site cannot be visited without a guide. Tickets are sold only through the centre's own website, for a named date and a named time slot, and the advice is to arrive a quarter of an hour early to get organised before the group sets off. Arrive late and staff will try to fit you into the first tour with space, which on a quiet weekday can be a long wait.

The published hours need care, because the operator publishes two different sets. The booking page gives Sunday to Thursday 10:00 to 16:00 with the last tour at 14:00, Friday and holiday eves the same, and Saturday closed, which matches the notice on the home page. The page headed 'important to know' still carries an older timetable of 09:00 to 17:00 Sunday to Thursday and Saturday with a last tour at 15:00, and 09:00 to 15:00 on Fridays and holiday eves. The booking calendar is the one that governs. The operator adds that summer months run to different hours, with afternoon and evening slots added, and that times have been changed because of the security situation.

Prices as posted by the operator, VAT included: ₪30 for an adult, ₪25 for a child aged 5 to 18, ₪20 for a senior citizen, a pensioner, a soldier in regular service or a visitor holding a disability card, ₪19 for a student or overseas youth, ₪15 for a pupil visiting with a school or a youth movement, and ₪25 a head for an adult within a group of at least thirty paying visitors. Children under five go in free. Cancel more than 48 hours ahead and there is no charge; cancel inside 24 hours and the full price is due.

Access is unusually well documented for a site this size. There is one main entrance, and the operator states a continuous accessible route from the car park through the reception building to the toilets, the exhibition buildings and the cafeteria, with four accessible parking bays about six metres from the accessible entrance. Reception has a hearing assistance system. The presentation halls carry infrared audio, personal headsets can be had from the guide, and the films are subtitled. Beacons along the route feed the Step Hear app, which gives spoken orientation and a short description of each display. There are nine public toilet rooms and one fully accessible cubicle. Animals are not admitted.