MUSEUMS IN ISRAEL: Ha'aretz has a long, rambling guide that is pretty open-minded about what constitutes a museum. It opens:

Flagrant exhibitionism
By Vered Levy-Barzilai
Yet another distinction for Israel: The country has the world's highest number of museums per capita, where you can learn about everything from the history of tractors to to ancient cheesemaking to erotica.

Alas, the advertisement for the Museum of the Cheesemakers proves to be premature:

Not long afterward, we find ourselves at the entrance to Gilon where a sign points to Hanoked Dairy. This is the next destination, the Museum of Ancient Cheesemaking Equipment and this is the scene that greets a visitor: a rugged wooden building perched on the edge of a cliff, with a balcony overlooking a breathtaking Galilee vista. Next to the building is a cowshed and sheep pen, or something similar, all empty. Not a living soul is around. The wind is hot and dry. On the wooden deck of the balcony are two heavy wooden tables with five chairs around each one. Nature. Silence. The scent of local herbs wafts through the air. The only sounds are that of the rustling of leaves in the treetops and the tinkle of the chimes suspended around the balcony.

One chair is occupied by a young woman who is writing. This is Rinat Barzilai, the daughter of Danny, the proprietor. She has a wide, warm smile. "Hello, can I help you with something?" Yes - we're here for the museum. She wrinkles her brow. "The museum? Uh, okay. The museum. The ancient tools, right? Come, I'll show you." Right inside the cabin she points to three ancient-looking jugs hanging on the wall. "Would you prefer a cheese platter with bread on the side, or two cheese sandwiches and a platter of vegetables?" Pardon, but is this the museum? "Well, it's not really a museum," she apologizes, embarrassed. "Dad is in Switzerland now. When they get back he plans to open a mini-museum in our cheese cellar. We'll have `museum cheeses.'" So right now is there museum of ancient cheesemaking equipment? "No, there isn't. Perhaps you'd like to see the cellar?"

The cellar is kept cooled to an exact temperature, just like in Provence, and contains hundreds of hard and ripe European-style organic goat cheeses. Still, the dominant aroma is of wine. "Dad cleans and processes the cheeses with wine." But where are all the sheep and goats? "The Arabs kept stealing them until Dad finally gave up and starting buying organic goat milk from other growers."

Why did the Galilee tourism web site say there was a museum of cheesemaking here? Barzilai has no idea. "We never advertised anything like that and our Web page also doesn't say anything like that. Here, look at our business card: Hanoked Dairy, European-style organic cheese from goats' milk and sheep's milk. So what'll it be - the platter or sandwiches?"

But, perhaps more relevant to PaleoJudaica, there is the House of the Anchors, a museum for ancient fishing in Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee):

There's a certain character who lives on Kibbutz Ein Gev - an 86-year-old fisherman, researcher and writer known as Mendel Nun. People say he's a walking archive of the Kinneret. For years, Nun has been extracting historical and archaeological findings from the Kinneret. On the kibbutz, he worked as a fisherman. "I'd go out on the water at six in the evening and come back at night or at dawn, just like any professional fisherman," he recalls.

In 1969, during one of his independent forays around the area, he discovered the church at Kursi inside the Byzantine monastery near Ein Gev, a major attraction and pilgrimage site for Christian tourists. Later he was involved in the discovery of the ancient harbor and wharf there (which was uncovered by marine archaeologists Avner Raban and Elisha Linder). The discovery of the harbor ignited his imagination and gave him no respite. "I kept looking for more harbors, I was sure there were many of them and that I'd find them, and I really did," he recounts with a twinkle in his eye. He has since located 14 more ancient harbors and thousands of ancient items and artifacts: anchors, weights, tools and fishing equipment.

He's a thin, not very tall man with delicate and noble features, and not overly loquacious. But Yoel Ben-Yosef, the local museum director, wants it to be clear that Nun was always a tough guy with a strong physique who withstood without fail all the hardest tests that the Kinneret poses to its fishermen. Nun is married to Gasya, but it's obvious to all, including her, who his first love is. Their house is situated four meters from the Kinneret. Over the years, he has published books about the Kinneret, about archaeology, about fishing in ancient times, about the ancient ports in the area. He wasn't always called Nun. In Latvia, his name was Neustadt. He later chose the Aramaic surname Nun - "fish."

The entryway to his house is filled with hundreds of ancient fishing weights that the museum had no room for. Ten years ago in Ein Gev, he opened Beit Ha'oganim ("House of the Anchors") - a museum devoted to the history of fishing in the Kinneret, which is now run by kibbutz member Ben-Yosef. When Nun first started the museum, the kibbutz let him use the old guesthouse - a small, quaint building built in the 1920s by PICA (the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association). In the distant past, the building housed important guests like the emissaries of Baron Rothschild who came to check on his lands and businesses in the area. After 1948, it was used as the kibbutz's sewing workshop, but its glory days would eventually return. It was renovated, painted in pastel shades, filled with rare artifacts and reborn as Mendel Nun's fishing museum.

It consists of one not very large room, which is reach by a narrow hallway. The items, some of which are very valuable in archaeological terms, are displayed in a jumbled array on the floor, on the walls and on tables. Who is coming to see the things that Nun has gleaned from the Kinneret? These days, hardly anyone, he says sadly. Ben-Yosef says that the little museum used to get 1,000 a year. "Until the intifada. Since then, it's been the same for us as for everyone else. We've had very few visitors. We get a few students and some Christian tourists once in a while."

If you're interested in Israeli museums, there are lots more in this article