The Teva Museum

 

Have you ever been to a museum where it looks as if the exhibits haven't been touched in about fifty years? The exhibits are dated, the decor is old, and everything looks a bit neglected? Today's trip to the Nature, or "Teva" Museum, brought us to one of these old-fashioned cultural institutions. If you go to a museum such as this one with (as one travel website says) "modest expectations" and an eye for the kitschiness of the place, you might not be too disappointed. It also helps to bring along a 21-month-old child who finds things like salad spinners and pine cones interesting; he's bound to find something to "ooh" and "aah" over, no matter how lame the museum actually is!

 

The Teva Museum is in a beautiful part of the city, the German Colony, and the Museum is housed in a very old building, so those two factors alone drew us to the site. (We also had to go because Alexander's middle name is Teva!). Turns out the building was originally built by an Armenian merchant at the end of the 19th century; it was then occupied by a Turkish governor and the British High Commissioner before being abandoned after the War of Independence in 1948. In the 60s, the space was turned into a natural history museum. I honestly don't think it's been touched since. Inside, the building has a steep stone staircase, very tall Victorian ceilings, and many dark rooms that contain exhibits on the wildlife that has lived in Israel (from dinosaurs up to the present), as well as exhibits on everything from the human body to "color in nature." It was an eclectic collection, to say the least. I was a little unnerved by the exhibit on human embryo development, and I was distracted by the poor electrical connections in some of the rooms, which caused flickering lights and strange buzzing noises. But putting aside those oddities, there were some nice dioramas containing all sort of (stuffed) wildlife. Alexander had a great time running through the empty museum (yes, we were the only visitors) and checking out everything from the cheetahs to the peacocks to the owls to the giant turtle shells. He definitely had a good time. So while the Jerusalem Nature Museum is a funky old place, and probably not the first site I'd suggest you see if you spend a few days in this city, we enjoyed our visit there today.

 

We took some pictures of the dioramas inside the museum, but rather than bore you with photos of dead, stuffed animals, here are a few shots of us outside the museum. The photo at the top of today's entry is a window box full of flowers we saw outside someone's house on our walk to the museum (flowers are everywhere in the city right now!). The photo below of Alexander and Eric with the dinosaur outside the museum is one of my new favorites. And below that are a couple more photos that show the outside of the old, historic building.