The bidding of 268 works in a museum in Jerusalem suspended

Some of the Middle Eastern objects that Sotheby's had planned to auction.Jonathan Brady / Europa Press

There was a museum so poor that it had to auction its works to survive.

The Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, whose collections of Middle Eastern crafts and antique watch jewelry rarely visit tourists, was preparing to auction 268 of its works at Sotheby's in London starting Tuesday at a price of output of about eight million euros.

The Hermann de Stern Foundation, which owns the pieces that were to be auctioned in London, assured that the liquidation of 5% of the museum's collection was the only way to finance the institution and keep its doors open to the public in the elegant Jerusalem district of Rehavia.

One of the residents of the neighborhood, the President of the State of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, has led a movement of indignation supported by the Ministry of Culture and the General Prosecutor's Office that has managed to suspend the auction at the last minute, according to reported this Tuesday the Hebrew press.

Luxurious Ottoman rugs, refined glass vessels, Koranic manuscripts and even a 15th-century Turkmen silver helmet were to be sold in public auction along with more than 60 watches from his permanent collection, among which the pocket chronometer acquired for the king stands out. British George IV in 1818.

The Minister of Culture, Hili Tropper, had claimed from those responsible for the foundation the property titles of the objects that were going to be sold to the highest bidder, but the documents have not yet been presented.

A museum spokeswoman told

newspaper

that Sotheby's had been asked to "temporarily postpone the bidding until November" in order to justify the full legality of the sale of the artistic assets.

The son of a scholar of oriental culture and a Hebrew translator of Arabic literature, President Rivlin on Monday spoke openly against the departure from the country of the pieces in the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art.

"These works have a deeper and more remarkable value than money (...) are part of the cultural and spiritual heritage of Israel and the Middle East," warned the head of the Jewish state before asking the public authorities to take action in the case.

The state attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, intervened shortly afterwards on behalf of the Ministry of Culture, which maintains that the assets do not belong to the foundation, but to the Jerusalem museum itself.

Bankruptcy of the institution

Those responsible allege that the coronavirus pandemic has caused the bankruptcy of the institution, although the auction of part of the collection was scheduled for 2017 in view of the financial crisis that it was going through.

The museum's director, Nadin Sheiban told the Times of Israel digital portal that the works that were up for auction “were examined one by one before making a decision on their sale, to avoid the loss of prestige of the collection and with the sole objective of maintaining its exhibition halls are open. "In Sheiban's opinion, the pieces are not part of the cultural heritage, since they were brought from abroad and not found in Israel, which would require an export permit from the Antiquities Authority.

Founded in 1974 by British philanthropist Vera Bryce Salomons, the Museum of Islamic Art was born with the desire to build bridges between Jewish and Muslim cultures.

To do this, he assembled a wide range of pieces of calligraphy, jewelry and other artistic objects from the Middle East, to which he joined the unique collection of watches that he had inherited from his father, Lord David Salomons, with unique pieces of the famous Swiss Breguet models.

The thieves were not long in corroborating the high valuation of the chronometers.

In 1983, a hundred of the world's most treasured antique clocks were stolen from museum cabinets in Jerusalem.

They took more than 25 years to be recovered and return, once repaired, to their exhibition halls.

Among those jewels was the pocket watch of the French Queen Marie Antoinette, the masterpiece of the legendary watchmaker Abraham Breguet, valued at 30 million euros.