Curse of the Tolerance Museum (Cont'd)

Museum of Tolerance, Jerusalem. Photo: Shay Gil

All museum construction projects come in over budget and late, but Jerusalem's ill-fated Museum of Tolerance takes the cake.

An initiative of L.A.'s Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jerusalem MOT was conceived as a sister institution to Pico Blvd.'s Museum of Tolerance. Announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier circa 2000, the Jerusalem museum has just opened its doors 25 years later. The original opening date was to have been 2005.

What happened? Bilbao, for one thing. Turn-of-the century museum builders believed that an audacious starchitect building could draw affluent crowds to cities off the cultural tourism track. Hier commissioned Frank Gehry himself to design the building.

Gehry produced an ambitious design that scandalized Israel's more conservative critics. Then sticker shock set in. The client asked for a radically scaled-down and cheaper building. Gehry, who didn't need the aggravation, quit the project in 2010.

Wife-and-husband Israeli architects Bracha and Michael Chyutin took over after Gehry, creating an all-new design from scratch. After two years, they walked off the project too. The museum was built from the Chyutins' plans, though without their direct assistance.

It was discovered, shortly after groundbreaking, that the site sat on a 1000-year-old Muslim graveyard. That led to protests, lawsuits, and an Israeli Supreme Court-litigated reinterment of remains. 

A Roman aqueduct was also discovered during construction, mandating a separate 7-year delay so that Israeli archeologists could excavate the site.

The museum engaged a team of Chinese construction workers, and COVID stranded them in China.

MOTJ's opening is best described as a soft launch. Two temporary exhibits are on view, while the permanent galleries remain to be installed. Hier insisted MOTJ would not be a Holocaust museum. It would focus on the future. Absent a time machine, it's hard to build a collection in that area. "Tolerance" is not something you can put in a display case. These issues affect the Los Angeles MOJ as well, a place best-known for school field trips (as satirized on South Park) and star-studded galas.  Descriptions of the Jerusalem museum emphasize rentable meeting spaces and touch-screen-heavy "interactive" exhibits. 

A Haaretz headline paraphrases Voltaire: "Jerusalem's Museum of Tolerance Has Little to Do with Museums or Tolerance."

Auditorium, Museum of Tolerance, Jerusalem