Congratulating my dearest friend, artist/sculptor/designer Ilana Goor whose museum was recently named and recognized as one of world’s best beach museums. For the past twenty years, Goor has developed her home, a 270 year-old gem in Old Jaffa, into one of the most beautiful and distinctive museums in the world, shaping it according to her own vision, her own taste, and her personal aesthetics. When I visit Israel, I always make sure to make a stop at the Ilana Goor Museum in Jaffa, set on a hill with a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean, because it always changes. Whether it is a domed ceiling crafted of hundreds of earthenware pots in the 18th century, which she has recently unearthened; or a new exhibition by one of the new and upcoming Israeli artists which Goor constantly discovers in her endless trips across the country in the quest of the best art created in Israel, or an enormous sculptural fountain which she has installed on the roof which she has recently turned into a stunning garden, the Ilana Goor Museum is always surprising and fresh. The residence of Goor and her husband Lenny Lowengrub, this stone structure was originally built as an inn, serving Jewish pilgrims arriving to what was at the time Palestine’s only port, en route to Jerusalem; In the second half of the 19th century, the inn was turned into a factory for olive oil soap, and with the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, it was used as a synagogue, before Goor and Lowengrub purchased part of it in the 80s and the rest later, transforming a forgotten building into a gem, and one of the most ambitious projects erected in Tel Aviv.
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