ANTIQUITIES DEALER SHLOMO MOUSSAIEFF has a long interview with Lauren Gelfond Feldinger ("The genuine article") in the Jerusalem Post. Worth reading in full, but here's an excerpt from the end:

Did you only collect or did you also sell?

I sold to Narkiss, Reifenberg and Sukenik and they taught me what everything is, all the years until I left Israel. [E.L. Sukenik, the father of archeologist Yigael Yadin, was one of the premiere early state archaeologists. Adolf Reifenberg was a renowned archeologist and numismatist, and professor of art history. Bezalel Narkiss was the first director of Hebrew University, anIsrael Prize winner and the founder of an index of Jewish art, antiquities and architecture.] When I left Israel, around age 35, I stopped selling and now I only collect.

[...]

Why do you snub Israel's antiquities laws?

These are ridiculous laws from the time of the Turks. The Antiquities Authority should be teaching and not torturing. They should ignite history. Instead, they find Arab shepherds and beat them and take what they have. What do they have, broken clay pieces? Bravo. All day they sit with a telescope to see who is going in the field to look for something, it's ridiculous. For a 500-millimeter piece of parchment, they will put a man in jail.

If you build a building, you have to stop work, you have to pay for the excavation - not them. This is torture. The laws don't make any sense. This is what they do with their budget? The law should allow more freedom, let anybody display anything in his house, and not make a coin collection worth $10 illegal. They have 600,000 coins in storage, what do they display? A few pieces.

I have artifacts from the time of Abraham. I have artifacts from the second our people were born. They call me a looter. They call me an antiquities thief. Nobody wanted to publish my things [that were not found in situ]. But the museums could only pray to have such acollection as I have. Now that they realize that how much I have and that it is not fake, they all love me, they all want my collections.


What will happen to your 60,000 artifacts after you?

Museums put everything in storage. My wife should auction my collections to people who will not put them in cellars but will love them like I do. n

He also talks about the forgery trial, selling fine jewelery to the stars, being a WWII prisoner of war, and says that his precious gem business can be traced back twelve generations to David the brother of Maimonides.