FOUNDERS MUSEUM – MAALOT

The Founders Museum in Maalot commemorates the founders of Maalot who emigrated from Morocco and settled there, by means of original items which are the private collection of the Museum manager and founder Bezalel Dahan and of the residents of Maalot.
By means of photographs, certificates, furnishing items, precise reconstruction of an immigrant’s home and also holy books including a Torah scroll, the Museum attempts to give a glimpse of the life of the founders in the settlement that became a town.
The Museum is located in a building of the Rakevet neighbourhood with an asbestos roof similar to the housing projects in which the residents lived in 1959. Entire families lived in small 45 m2 homes.
One of the interesting exhibits in the Museum is a precise reconstruction of a home, including the original concrete floor, a living room with authentic furniture from the fifties as well as a sideboard called by the settlers “a buffet”, a radio, record player, table, sofa, kitchen with a wooden ice box, shelves decorated with lace ribbons, food utensils, a spirit cooker, a tea tray with a brass tea pot and small tea glasses, a meat grinder, a “Fireside” heater which was found in almost every home in Israel, a dining corner with a wooden table surrounded by original stools with wine bottles for Kiddush (blessing on the wine) from 1964. A bedroom for the children in which two children slept head to toe in a narrow Jewish Agency bed on straw mattresses and Jewish Agency wool blankets. Even an original school satchel is displayed here.
In the central space you will find an exhibition of photographs that reconstruct Maalot from the beginning of its foundation until 1974, the year of dramatic change following the terrible Maalot tragedy and the year in which a group of young people took control of the local government which changed the face of the settlement totally.
In the central space you will also find an exhibition of the religious culture in Maalot which includes a Torah scroll, an ornamental curtain, amulets and Judaica.
Temporary exhibitions are held and amongst others a riveting exhibition was held on the beautiful women from the Atlas mountains and an exhibition about the Romanian immigration that settlement firstly in Tarshita and thereafter founded Me’Ona near by.