The story
The Hecht Museum sits on the campus of the University of Haifa, high on Mount Carmel, and grew from the lifelong collecting of one industrialist. Reuben Hecht, who ran the city's grain silos, spent 60 years gathering the archaeology of ancient Israel.
Its centrepiece is a ship. In shallow water off a nearby kibbutz, divers found the wreck of a wooden merchant vessel about 2,400 years old, and after long conservation it was rebuilt on a frame in its own wing, its wooden anchor and the carpenter's toolbox laid out beside it. Around the antiquities Hecht hung a very different collection: Impressionist and School of Paris paintings, with Monet, Pissarro, Soutine and Modigliani among them.
The museum is free, and it keeps the mix of ancient pottery and modern canvases its founder liked to live with.
