Hecht Museum

Reuben Hecht was born in Antwerp on 15 August 1909 into a wealthy, assimilated and anti-Zionist family whose shipping firm ran cargo boats on the Rhine, and moved to Basel when he was nine. He went the other way from his parents. In 1933 he was working under Ze'ev Jabotinsky at the Revisionist Zionist movement's Paris office; he settled in Mandatory Palestine in 1936; after independence he won a concession to build grain silos, founded the Dagon company and put up the Haifa silo and later the Ashdod one. He was a principal aide to Menachem Begin at the Camp David talks, and died in Haifa on 14 April 1993.

The collecting started early. By the Hebrew account of his life it began with a coin of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus that came into his hands in the 1920s while he was a student in Munich, which he said gave him a direct sense of the link between that period and his own. He bought for about sixty years, concentrating on the Canaanite period to the end of the Byzantine. Both the Hebrew and English accounts of the museum state his reasoning plainly: he held that archaeology was one of the important expressions of Zionism, and that the finds were proof of the connection between the Jewish people and the land.

The museum was the culmination of what he did for the university, alongside a chair in Zionism and history and the Herzl Institute. It is not a stand-alone building: it occupies level 1 of the Eshkol Tower, so a visitor walks in through a working campus.

In the autumn of 1985 Ami Eshel, a member of Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael about 35 km down the coast from Haifa, was diving off the kibbutz when he saw stones of a kind that does not belong on this coast lying beside pieces of wood and pot sherds. He reported it to the Israel Antiquities Authority and the maritime studies centre at the University of Haifa. Accounts differ on the detail: the English record puts the wreck 75 metres offshore in 2 metres of water, the Hebrew one 70 metres offshore in 1.5 metres. Either way it had lain buried in the surf zone since the late fifth century BCE.

A University of Haifa team under the maritime archaeologist Elisha Linder took the permit in 1987, working with the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies and a hull specialist from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M. The dig was miserable rather than glamorous. Sand kept sliding back into the trench, the water was murky, the site was small enough that no more than three pairs of divers could work at once, and of three seasons totalling 160 days only 32 were spent excavating.

What came up with the hull is the reason the display is interesting rather than merely old. Seventy pottery vessels, many complete: jugs, plates, lamps, a cooking pot, storage jars, decorated amphorae. Woodworking tools, a whetstone and a stock of spare treenails and tenons, which is to say a ship's carpenter's kit. Ornamental boxes, including a pair shaped like violins. Rope, a woven basket, and food remains of grape, fig, olive and barley that point to a summer sinking.

Where it was built is not settled. It was first taken for Phoenician, on the grounds that it sank at the height of Phoenician seafaring; later work on the pottery and the construction argued for Cyprus, perhaps tied to the Cypriot presence at nearby Dor; a University of Haifa master's thesis puts the origin in western Turkey. What the excavators did agree on is that the timber shows neither shipworm damage nor the wear of long service, which points to a vessel lost on or close to its first voyage.

• Discovered autumn 1985 by a kibbutz member, Ami Eshel
• Excavated 1988-1989 under Elisha Linder, University of Haifa
• Seventy pottery vessels, a carpenter's tool kit and a one-armed wooden anchor recovered
• Reassembled in a purpose-built wing at the museum in March 1999

The timbers are original, and the effort that went into keeping them so is most of the story. Everything lifted from the sea went into fresh-water tanks and then into permanent tanks at the University of Haifa, where the wood was impregnated over seven years with heated polyethylene glycol to replace the water in its cells and stop it collapsing as it dried. That was finished in 1996. The wood seasoned until March 1999, when it was moved into a wing built for it and put back together by an international team. The anchor, the tools and a selection of the pottery are shown alongside it.

What is not there is the upper part of the vessel. Only the section buried deep enough to be sealed from oxygen and seawater survived, and it has not been speculatively rebuilt above that line. Published figures for the hull disagree: the University of Haifa and the Hebrew record give 13 metres by 4, the English record about 11 by 4. Laden weight is put at around 25 tonnes, roughly half of it cargo and ballast.

The construction is what shipbuilders come to see. She was built shell first: the planking was joined edge to edge with tenons pegged at intervals of about 13 centimetres and only then stiffened with frames, fastened with copper nails traced to ore from north-western Cyprus. Bow and stern planks were sewn together with rope. The keel is a single Aleppo pine timber, with a replaceable false keel of oak in three pieces beneath it to take the knocks. Carbon-14 dating and the pottery put the ship at the end of the fifth century BCE.

The anchor deserves its own minute. It is a one-armed oak anchor with the stock filled with a lead mineral, found off the starboard bow with rope still attached, and it was the first complete ancient wooden anchor of its type ever recovered: maritime archaeologists had argued in the 1970s that such anchors must have existed without being able to show one. Its wood matches the wood of the ship's tenons, which suggests the same carpenters made both. A full-size sailing replica, Ma'agan Michael II, was built later by a University of Haifa team and launched in Haifa Bay, on a date Wikipedia gives as 17 March 2017 in its text and December 2016 in a caption. It is not in the museum.

The second half of the museum has nothing to do with archaeology, which surprises people who came for the ship. Hecht collected French painting of 1830 to 1930, the Barbizon school through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to the School of Paris, alongside Jewish art of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century from the Netherlands, Germany and eastern Europe. The University of Haifa names Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Soutine, Modigliani and van Gogh; the English record adds Corot and Max Liebermann, and Modigliani's Portrait of Maude Abrantes of 1907.

The most affecting room is not the famous names. The Oscar Gez collection, given to the university in the late 1970s by the Gez family of Switzerland, gathers paintings and sculpture by eighteen Jewish artists whose working lives were ended by the Holocaust, and is hung together rather than dispersed.

Beyond the galleries is an auditorium of 380 upholstered seats on two levels, 180 in the stalls and 200 in the gallery, which the university describes as accessible to wheelchair users and which can be hired for lectures and concerts. On its stage stands a pipe organ assembled by Gideon Shamir from parts of older instruments that had served in churches around the country, described by the university as some 150 years old. Hecht bought it before the hall existed.

In late August 2024 a family from northern Israel was walking through the entrance area when their youngest son tipped over a large Canaanite storage jar standing open on the floor, and it broke. The jar had been on display for 35 years, had been found complete in excavations in Samaria, and was dated by the museum to between 2200 and 1500 BC, most likely made to carry wine or oil. Sources differ on the child's age: the BBC and the Associated Press said four, Ynet five.

The museum's response is what made the story travel. The director, Inbal Rivlin, told Ynet that the decision not to put the jar in a case came from the founder, who had said that a museum is not a mausoleum and not a coffin but a living, dynamic place, and that this one is open free of charge to families with children. She invited the mother and child back for a guided visit, and the museum's conservator, Roee Shafir, filmed the repair. The Associated Press reported the jar back in its original position on 11 September 2024, and quoted Shafir saying the work was straightforward because every fragment came from one complete vessel.

The museum told the BBC it would carry on displaying items without barriers or glass walls whenever possible, and it has stuck to that. The corollary, which Rivlin put directly, is that families should brief children first: if a label does not say an object may be touched, it may not be. The museum also said it would 3D-print clay pieces to stand beside the real ones under signs saying these can be handled.

In December 2025 Haaretz reported a new space at the museum given over to the heritage of German-speaking Jews, the community nicknamed the Yekkes, of whom about 60,000 reached Mandatory Palestine between Hitler's rise to power and the outbreak of the Second World War. The paper's reporter noted, as a surprise, how little of the display is about the Holocaust. This wing is the one exception to free entry: the museum's site states that admission to it is charged, though no figure is published.

The site also carries a standing notice that some wings are under renovation, and Rivlin told Ynet in 2024 that the museum was shut for works at that point and that a sculpture garden had recently been added outside. Neither the scope nor the end date is published, so anyone travelling for one particular hall should telephone 04-8240308 rather than assume.

One further thing belongs to the museum but is not in it. Derech Hadorot, the Way of the Generations, is an open-air site in Carmel Park just south of the university, conceived by Hecht in 1975 and run jointly with the park. Structures that faced destruction elsewhere were taken apart and re-erected along a signed path: dwellings and burial structures from Ramat Matred, Iron Age grain stores from a Negev fortress, olive presses from ancient Castra. The entrance is off Route 672, first left after the university, and it needs a car.