Anu museum offers virtual culinary tours with foodie Gil Hovav

This Hanukkah, Anu Museum’s Foodish culinary wing is launching self-guided tours through the museum’s exhibits, led by culinary expert Gil Hovav.

There is also an audio tour for children edited by the creative duo Yuval Segal and Yigal Shapira.

The tour takes visitors through the many images, videos and digital displays in the museum that explain the role of recipes and food in global Jewish history.

At one stop, Hovav speaks about the Sachertorte, the chocolate cake with apricot filling created by Jewish baker Franz Sacher that became Austria’s most famous cake.

The cake’s popularity helped expand the Sacher family’s business into the still-existing luxury Hotel Sacher.

Hovav discusses the turn-of-the-century protests over kosher meat prices in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and tells how couscous came to be served on Tuesdays in Tunisia, when bakeries were traditionally closed, leaving people without their daily dose of carbohydrates.

At the very end of the museum tour, near the famed Sasson Codex bible, Hovav discusses biblical recipes, such as Esau’s lentil stew and what that dish morphed into for Jews in their home kitchens.

When Anu — Museum of the Jewish People reopened its revamped version of the Diaspora Museum in 2021, it launched Foodish, its culinary wing, whose offerings included pop-up events, lectures, podcasts, workshops and its main focus, a Jewish food database.

“One of our main challenges was how to show taste and smells in a museum where food isn’t allowed among the exhibits,” said Merav Oren, the Foodish director.

The tours will be launched to the general public at events for families throughout the Hanukkah holiday

The audio tours include the voices of actors performing the characters and people behind the culinary anecdotes, including stories about David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein and others in the Jewish world.