The Ethnographic Department addresses the link between an art museum and an ethnographic museum, between “fine” art and “folk” art, and the tension that exists between original, restoration, copy and adaptation. All of these are aspects central to the curatorial thinking that has guided the Museum of the Contemporary since its onset. The Museum was founded in December 2009 at the Mamuta Center in Ein Kerem, in the home of  Daniela Passal, formerly the home of Palestinian researcher Issa Manun and in the interim “absentee property”.

The first exhibition dealt with the museum as an institution, with the topography of Israeli memory, with the local historiography of the village Ein Karem and and with the home of the museum – the home of Daniela Passal. The Museum also developed a digital storage room of exhibitions which are not viewable on the net but are offered for downloading – each exhibition as a “package” for printing, exhibiting or re-installing – according to the physical and economic possibilities of the downloading body.

The Ethnographic Department also deals in part with the history of the structure in which it dwells. This is the Leprosarium Jesus Hilfe , founded as an isolatedrefuge for leprosy patients. It was created by the German-Protestant Moravian community in 1867 and operated for twenty years in a building on today’s Agron Street, Jerusalem. In 1887 the institute moved to a new building in the Talbiya neighborhood of Jerusalem, planned by Konrad Shick.