Biography | Martin Weyl — He Helped Build This Hilltop Museum, Then Stood at Its Opening as a Laborer

People meet Martin Weyl as the later director of the Israel Museum.

The paper trail starts on the same ridge, before the doors existed.

In 1964 he left Kibbutz Beit HaEmek in the western Galilee and took work as a construction laborer on the unfinished campus at Givat Ram.

Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad were still raising the pavilions on the hill then called Neve Sha'anan, the Place of Tranquility.

The official opening was 11 May 1965.

President Zalman Shazar dedicated the complex under a clear sky.

More than two thousand guests stood on the ridge: Levi Eshkol, David Ben-Gurion, Teddy Kollek, Billy Rose, and Isamu Noguchi among them.

Weyl was on the site as a builder, not as staff.

Later anniversary reporting has him among the workers who helped assemble an antique synagogue interior brought from Venice, and present on opening day still in that laborer's role.

After the dedication he stayed on as a guide.

He studied art history at the nearby Hebrew University and received a doctorate there in 1974.

From guide he moved through assistant curator, sculpture curator, and chief curator.

In 1981 the same campus made him director.

He held that chair until 1996, thirty-two years after he first picked up tools on the hill.

The visitor who stands here is standing where a Dutch-born kibbutznik poured hours into a building he would one day run.

Mansfeld's pavilions still sit above the Valley of the Cross, across from the Knesset hill.

Photo: Asaf C. (he.wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons