You Come In Without Shoes

In the Nahal Ashan neighborhood, close to the Tuviyahu high school and the children's park, there is a museum that you enter without shoes. It is called Lunada.

And this decision is not a whim. It is meant to induce calm and a homely feeling — that is, to turn the museum into a place where you sit on the floor, and not a place where you walk about quietly beside display cases.

It was built in 2015, and is named after the brothers Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel, who donated five million dollars to the Beersheba municipality for its establishment. The center and its contents were initiated, created and developed by a company headed by Tamar Hadar and Efrat Adiv, and the design and the planning of the installations were done by Yael Tavet and Roi Roth.

The museum is intended for children from the age of a year and a half up to the age of twelve — and for their parents. And it is the first in the country whose areas are multi-age, and were planned so that a whole family, over a wide range of ages, would find in them a shared interest.

And it sits in a large building in which a branch of Havayeda was previously housed. And what is a multi-age area, really? It is an area in which a two-year-old child and an eleven-year-old child can stand side by side, and each of them does something different in it that interests him. Not an activity for the little ones and an activity for the big ones — the same activity, at two levels.

On its three floors, over four thousand square meters, there are eight areas and more than fifty activities.

In the 'Seeing the World' area there is a maze, a globe on which animals are attached according to their place of living, a climbing wall with the names of mountains and their heights, and a space maze. In the 'Moving' areas there is a dark room through which laser beams pass, and ball cannons. In the art and music area there is a wall that serves as a giant coloring page of famous paintings. And there is an area of emotions and self-expression.

And the last area is perhaps the most interesting of them. In the languages area the very same picture appears with a caption in Hebrew, in Russian, in English, in Arabic and in Amharic. And at a station in it the child reads passages from the Declaration of Independence and is filmed.

And at the foot of the museum the children's park extends, over fifty-four dunams. And at the entrance stands a long sculpture, made of cylinders arranged according to the colors of the rainbow. It is the first thing you see, even before you take off your shoes.