The Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein National Campus for the Archaeology of Israel is the future building of theIsrael Antiquities Authority. Ground was broken in 2010,[1] and construction began in 2012 inJerusalem. The building will concentrate all centralized administrative offices into one structure, currently at 3 locations throughout Jerusalem:Har Hotzvim,Israel Museum, and theRockefeller Museum.[2] The campus is being built on 20,000 square meters located between theIsrael Museum and theBible Lands Museum. It was designed byMoshe Safdie.
When completed, the 36,000- sq.-m. building will house offices, archaeological artifacts, archeology laboratories, the National Library for the Archeology of Israel, and serve as a museum of archaeology.[3] Construction began in 2012 with the excavation of an enormous foundation cut into a hillside so that so that the roof level entrance of the large building is at ground level between the two, existing, major museums, while the lowest floor opens onto a street at the foot of the hill.[4][5] The Antiquities Authority was formerly located in cramped quarters at theRockefeller Museum inEast Jerusalem.[5]
The roof of the building is a large plaza with views of the Jerusalem hills. Several important Byzantine-era mosaics from churches and synagogues are on permanent display; this part of the campus is open to the public while construction continues on the interior of the building the visitor's feet.[3] Displays include a 6th-century, Byzantine-periodmosaic floor, discovered in an ancient synagogue inEin Gedi and featuring a curse inJudeo-Aramaic that invokes God's wrath upon anyone who neglects his family, provokes conflict, steals property, slanders his friends or "reveals the secret of the town", presumably referring to Ein Gedi's balsam industry or possibly cursing those who slader their Jewish community in front of Gentiles.[6][7][8]
31°46′27″N35°12′08″E / 31.7743°N 35.2022°E /31.7743; 35.2022
