Israel's Hilltop Ark

On a Jerusalem hill blasted by sun bright as sheet lightning. Israel's new $5,500,000 national museum opened last week to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Said Premier Levi Eshkol, recalling Noah's sons, "The museum will introduce something of the beauty of Japheth into the tents of Shem." Although the museum hardly has two of everything, it is an ark for art in the Middle East.

Doors from Cairo. The museum has four parts. Already 50,000 visitors have tunneled through the white-domed Shrine of the Book (TIME, April 30). Near by are five acres of contoured gardens, designed by Isamu Noguchi, containing sculptures given by Showman Billy Rose. Called the Billy Rose Art Garden (the word for sculpture--pesel--means a forbidden graven image), its terraces bank abstract works from Henry Moore to Tinguely, representational sculptures from Maillol to Rodin. The nudes not the abstractions forced two of Israel's chief rabbis to snub the inauguration.

Hugging the hillside like an Arab village is the museum's main silhouette: the 28 interconnected, boxy pavilions that house the Bezalel National Art Museum and the Samuel Bronfman Archaeological and Biblical Museum. Designed by Israeli Architects Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad, the pavilions are soft to the feet, with taupe carpeting over cork, and harsh on the eyes, with unshaded clerestories admitting a blaze of light. In the Bezalel* the exhibition is mostly on loan from ten countries, mainly illustrates Old Testament themes, and spans art history from the quattrocento to Vasarely's op. Where the Bezalel triumphs is its Judaica: intricate wooden doors from Cairo's medieval synagogue of Maimonides and an entire blue-and-gold baroque synagogue from Italy, donated by New York Investor Jakob Michael.

Bombproof Pits for Isaiah. Almost all the funds that built the museum came from the New World. The $800,000 Shrine of the Book was bankrolled by the Gottesman Foundation, named for the late Pulp-and-Paper Tycoon Samuel Gottesman. The U.S. Government has contributed $830,000 and the Bronfman museum was a $2,000,000 birthday gift from the children of the 70-year-old Canadian liquor magnate. Billy Rose estimates that his garden cost $1,600,000. But no one seems to mind a bit that this whole art complex lies within gunshot of the barbed-wire border of Jordan. Only the Isaiah scroll in Kiesler's shrine can lower into the safety of a bombproof pit. Explained Rose: "If there are a couple of million people who are willing to gamble flesh and blood on Israel, I don't see why I can't gamble a few tons of stone and marble. And if they are ever attacked, they can melt the metal down and make bullets out of the sculpture."

* Pronounced Buh-tzal-el, the museum is named after the first master craftsman in the Bible (Exodus 31:2), who built the tabernacle in the wilderness.

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