A Tale Beginning in Three Rooms

In 1933, Dr. Karl Schwarz, who had founded the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was invited by then-Mayor of Tel Aviv, Meir Dizengoff, to manage the first art museum in Palestine—the Tel Aviv Museum. Accordingly, he left the cultural world of Berlin and arrived in Tel Aviv, only to discover, to his surprise, that the museum in question was housed in three small rooms of the mayor’s private residence. The film by acclaimed director Arnon Goldfinger (The Apartment, 2011) is a compilation of archival materials and artworks that unfolds the story of the founding of the Tel Aviv Museum and reveals the disconcerting link between its growth and the tragedy that befell European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s.