Ben-Gurion's Desert Home and Tomb

The Hebrew Wikipedia account, footnoted throughout to the Israeli press of the day, puts the beginning in May 1953. Driving back from the opening of Ma'ale Ha'atzmaut on the road to Eilat, Ben-Gurion saw a hut and a few people at the roadside, stopped the car and got out. They were young people who had fought in the Negev in the War of Independence and had concluded that fighting for it was not enough, that it had to be settled. He was struck as much by the fact that they belonged to no settlement movement and to no party.

A few days later he wrote to them. 'In my 47 years in this country I have seen a number of pioneering enterprises,' the letter runs, and then: 'forgive me if I say that I have never in my life seen a pioneering enterprise like Sde Boker.' He had never envied any man or group, he added, but on that visit he had found it hard to suppress something like envy at not having taken part. At the end of September 1953 he gave the kibbutz 1,200 lira to buy camels, and asked what the terms of joining were. There was one condition: not to engage in politics.

He was 67. The minutes of the admissions committee survive. One member asked whether refusal was even possible. Another said he had to be accepted although it would be a burden. A third objected outright, on the grounds of the difficulties his arrival would create. He was accepted by a majority.

The rest ran fast and in public. Newspapers reported from 16 October 1953 that a Swedish hut was going up for him; on 22 October a partial denial appeared saying the site had not even been surveyed; on 10 November Paula visited the huts, by then standing, and chose the colour they would be painted. In early November he announced he would resign, and on 14 December the couple moved in. He had assumed Paula would stay in Tel Aviv. She did not, and by most accounts settled into the place more readily than he did.

• Kibbutz Sde Boker founded on 15 May 1952 by former soldiers
• Ben-Gurion's letter to its members, May 1953
• 1,200 lira donated for camels, late September 1953
• One condition of membership: no politics
• Moved in on 14 December 1953, a week after resigning

The Jewish Agency paid for three huts, identical to the Scandinavian prefabricated units then being put up across the country to relieve the housing shortage. One was fitted out for the couple: two separate bedrooms, a guest room and a large study with a library built to hold a thousand books. It was the only hut on the site with running water and sewage, a water heater, a refrigerator and gas. The other two housed his aides, his guards and his visitors, and guard posts, a fence and generators arrived with him.

The shelving was badly under-specified. The Heritage Institute now describes a library of more than 5,000 volumes in nine languages, covering Judaism and the Bible, philosophy, history, geography and the army, and says most of his books never came south: over 22,000 remain at the Tel Aviv house. Cataloguing began in January 2022 under Yad Ben-Zvi's Eretz Hefetz project. The hut's director, Gil Schnaider, told Ynet at the time that the team was registering about twenty books a day.

What that cataloguing turned up is the most human thing in the building. There are books in Japanese, Italian and Amharic. There is a Spanish Don Quixote he insisted on reading in the original, learned with Yitzhak Navon as his teacher, carrying his own marginal notes: transliterations into Hebrew, question marks, glosses. There is a Machiavelli in Italian, which he could probably follow because he had Latin.

The rest of the interior is the material culture of Israel in its first two decades, undisturbed: the furniture, the crockery, the pictures on the walls. In the guest room are a map of the country, the flag, a copy of the declaration of independence given to him by Golda Meir, and family photographs. His slippers and the pile of books beside his bed are where he left them.

• Three prefabricated huts, paid for by the Jewish Agency in 1953
• Two bedrooms, a guest room and a study with shelving for 1,000 books
• The only hut on site with running water, sewage, a water heater, a refrigerator and gas
• About 5,000 books in the study today, in nine languages
• Cataloguing began January 2022, at roughly twenty books a day

The instruction is in the will, and the museum publishes its own English rendering of it: 'I ask that the home in Sde Boker, which was my home until the day I passed away, shall be kept in its current state, including all furniture, books and magazines that are in it.' The same document asked that the house, its library and its contents be open to the public. In November 1974, a year after he died, the hut was inaugurated as a museum in the presence of the president and the prime minister.

In 1976 the David Ben-Gurion Law made the arrangement statutory. It set up the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute and specified that the institute shall be at Sde Boker and shall contain the hut and 'his library in the place where it was at the time of his death'. The museum around it was designed by Uri De Bar, work for which he received the Ben-Gurion Prize.

So the hut and its contents are original, and one other building is: the Gypsum House, which the operator calls the first permanent house built on the kibbutz and which now holds an exhibition on the founders and on Ben-Gurion's first days here. Almost everything else a visitor walks through is recent. The animation 'Ben-Gurion Hosts', the interactive tables of 'Ben-Gurion in the Test of Time', the film 'Who is a Leader?' and the outdoor Pioneering Park were all added to turn a small house into a site that holds a school group for two hours.

The hut and its exhibition were refurbished in 2010 under a Prime Minister's Office heritage programme, and conservation of the building began in January 2022. Then, in October 2025, the neighbourhood around it was reconstructed: Srugim reported a project led by the Heritage Institute with KKL-JNF and the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites, worked up from 1950s aerial photographs and residents' testimony. The morning paths Ben-Gurion walked were re-laid, roses of the kind Paula grew were planted at the entrance, and the water installation that gave the couple their running water was restored. It is a careful reconstruction, and it is a reconstruction: the sensation of standing in a 1950s kibbutz lane is a year old.

• Opened as a museum in November 1974, a year after his death
• David Ben-Gurion Law, 1976: the hut and library are protected by statute
• Original buildings: the hut and the Gypsum House
• Added later: four exhibitions, a sand table and the Pioneering Park
• The surrounding 1950s neighbourhood was rebuilt and completed in October 2025

Paula Ben-Gurion died on 29 January 1968 and was buried the following day on a plot south of the library building at Midreshet Sde Boker. Choosing it meant giving up the couple's entitlement to the plot of national leaders on Mount Herzl. Who chose the spot is not settled: Hebrew Wikipedia, following David Ohana and Michael Feige, gives one version in which his friend Avraham Zvion proposed it and Ben-Gurion approved, and another in which the idea was his own. He died on 1 December 1973 and was buried beside her two days later. The will asked that no eulogies be spoken at the funeral or at the graveside and that no honour volleys be fired.

Preparing the ground raised the plaza by several metres, so that although the two headstones stand side by side, Ben-Gurion's grave is in fact some metres higher than his wife's. The stones were designed by the sculptor Ezra Orion: plain rectangular blocks with diagonal plaques set into wide recesses along the top, carrying each name, the years of birth and death, and the year that person came to the country.

The setting was chosen by open competition. In May 1974 the National Parks Authority invited designs for the plaza and its surroundings, asking for a park that would let visitors come as pilgrims and that would be modest but full of dignity. Its chairman, Yaakov Yannai, argued that the library building below the plaza should be pulled down to open up space, but entrants were told to leave it standing and work it in; it later became the home of the Heritage Institute. A jury of thirteen, including Yigael Yadin, Teddy Kollek and the architects Al Mansfeld, Yaakov Rechter and Arieh Sharon, considered 54 submissions and chose the landscape architects Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur, later Israel Prize laureates.

What they built covers about 90 dunams and is mostly planting. A path of roughly 300 metres winds from the car park, stepped stone slabs and rocks laid along both sides among carob and olive trees so that it reads as the channel of a desert wadi, and delivers a walker into a large open plaza. The graves lie at its centre under pepper trees inside a black chain on posts. Stepped rock ledges double as seating, and beyond the low southern wall the ground falls into Nahal Zin. The state memorial ceremony is held here each year around the sixth of Kislev.

The grave has been attacked twice: with swastikas in February 1989, by a Haredi group calling itself KaSHeT, and with the word 'Hitler' in March 2005, reported the same day by both Ynet and Haaretz.

• Paula buried 30 January 1968; David buried 3 December 1973
• Mount Herzl declined in favour of the ridge above Nahal Zin
• Headstones by the sculptor Ezra Orion, carrying the year each of them came to the country
• 1974 competition: 54 entries, judged by a jury of thirteen
• Won by landscape architects Lipa Yahalom and Dan Zur
• About 90 dunams of garden; a path of roughly 300 m to the plaza

The hut compound is run by the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute and charges admission. The graves are run by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which publishes no entrance fee for them and gives them no line in its 2025 national price list; its page says only that the site is open in daylight hours and needs no booking. Hebrew Wikipedia notes that the grave garden is formally part of Ein Avdat National Park rather than a national park in its own right, which is why it has no gate of its own.

One of the activities the museum advertises is not at the museum. 'Trial of the People', in which visitors vote as a jury on five episodes in Israeli history, is at the Ben-Gurion campus at Midreshet Ben-Gurion and carries its own charge. The Pioneering Park is on the hut site but is an outdoor challenge course for booked groups, priced separately, which the operator states plainly is not accessible to people with physical disabilities and is classed as an extreme activity.

Accessibility at the hut is otherwise good and unusually specific: level paths throughout, a wheelchair to borrow at the desk, an accessible bay and two accessible toilets, an induction loop, subtitles on the films and audio description on the animation. The operator also says, without softening it, that the interactive tables of 'Ben-Gurion in the Test of Time' are not adapted for visitors with sight or hearing impairments.

A visit to both is a morning: about 90 minutes at the hut, ten minutes of driving, half an hour at the graves. Ein Avdat National Park is a few minutes further along the same road, which is how these three usually get combined.