Last update - 00:00 19/01/2008
Cabinet to appoint development team to establish national museum
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent
The cabinet is expected to appoint on Sunday a development team for the establishment of a national museum, which will put items from state archives on exhibition.
The museum will be given the patronage of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as well as that of former prime ministers Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
The team will be headed by Cabinet Secretary Oved Yehezkel, who initiated the project a few months ago, and include civil servants, representatives of national museums and archives, and public figures whose expertise is in the fields of history, culture and education.
Within five months' time, a working paper will be submitted to the government, outlining recommended topics for exhibitions.
Since the inception of the initiative, Yehezkel and his associates visited a number of archives and were appalled at the miserable condition of historical items. For example, in the Institute for the Research of the History of Hebrew Literature they found a journal that the poet Leah Goldberg kept when she was 14, and in a storage room in the Welfare Ministry they found dusty boxes with stacks of documents in former prime minister Levi Eshkol's handwriting.
Yehezkel said that "the deeper you go, the more it is amazing to realize that our national assets are being left to rot."
While the budget required for the museum is yet to be evaluated, several American Jewish philanthropists have shown interest in investing in it.