Joseph Bau fought the Nazis with wit and ink. Now, his Tel Aviv studio—named one of the world’s best attractions—faces demolition.
By Lee Tanenbaum
I first visited the museum in March 2024 during a volunteer trip to Israel. I expected to learn about art and history, but what I found was family. Joseph Bau’s daughters, Clila and Hadasa, greeted me with open arms, insisting that since their mother Rebecca was also a Tennenbaum, I was a long-lost cousin. That bond, forged in their father’s colorful studio filled with art, animation, Hebrew fonts, and poetry, touched me deeply. Joseph’s story moved me so profoundly that I committed myself to volunteering for the museum as a promotion and marketing consultant. For the past twenty months, I’ve worked alongside Clila and Hadasa to help keep their parents’ legacy alive.
Most people know Joseph Bau from Schindler’s List, which immortalized the moment he and fellow prisoner Rebecca Tennenbaum secretly married in 1944 inside the Plaszów concentration camp. With scraps of cloth for a veil and witnesses standing watch, their whispered vows were an act of resistance against Nazi brutality.
But Joseph Bau’s life was far more than a single cinematic scene. The documents he forged saved Jewish lives in the Krakow Ghetto, in the Plaszów labor camp, and at Oskar Schindler’s ammunition factory in Brünnlitz.
After the war, Joseph became one of Israel’s pioneering animators and graphic artists, using creativity and humor to help rebuild Jewish cultural life. Known as the Israeli Walt Disney, he became a typographer, poet, satirist, inventor, author, and publisher — all guided by the singular belief that joy is an act of resistance.
In 1960, Bau opened his art studio in Tel Aviv, a cultural laboratory of humor, design, poetry, and ideas. Today, that studio is the Joseph Bau Museum, preserving the life, art, and legacy of a man who brought laughter and creativity to a world recovering from tragedy.
Joseph also created covert documents for the Mossad that supported the capture of Adolf Eichmann and assisted legendary spy Eli Cohen.
For more than 20 years, his daughters Clila and Hadasa Bau have directed the Joseph Bau Museum, one of more than 200 officially recognized heritage sites in Israel.
It is unlike any museum in the world. Small but mighty, it houses the smallest theater in the world, where Bau’s ingenuity comes alive alongside his art, his irrepressible humor, and his self-made film projector and copier. Visitors leave not only bearing witness to history, but reawakened to life, inspired by the creativity and resilience that defined Bau’s extraordinary journey.
Perhaps that is why, in 2024, Tripadvisor named the Joseph Bau Museum Best of the Best — placing it in the top 1% of global attractions and #1 out of 300 things to do in Tel Aviv.
And yet, prestige is not protection. Today, the museum’s future hangs in the balance. The building that houses Bau’s original studio has been sold. Without a new home, this treasure — intimate, original, unrepeatable — could vanish.
A Story Reaching the World — At the Most Critical Time
I was honored to join Clila and Hadasa at the September 21 premiere of Paramount’s feature film, Bau, Artist at War at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Seeing Joseph and Rebecca Bau’s extraordinary story of survival, courage, and love come alive on the big screen was an unforgettable experience. It reminded me of why preserving the Joseph Bau Museum is so important. Joseph Bau’s legacy must continue to inspire future generations.
At the premiere, Clila and Hadasa walked the red-carpet bearing witness to their parents’ legacy — a legacy that survived genocide, espionage, war, love, reinvention, and now must survive real estate. This surge of global attention has opened a slim, urgent window — where awareness, momentum, and action can converge into rescue.
Bau, Artist at War, directed by Sean McNamara, was released in the U.S. and Canada on September 26, 2025, and premiered in Australia in November through the Jewish International Film Festival. The film is now available to purchase digitally in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Israel. Audiences around the world can now experience this extraordinary story of daring acts, resilience, and enduring love from home. The film is on major digital platforms, including Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Fandango at Home, YouTube, and other participating digital retailers.
In a parallel milestone, Joseph Bau’s original Holocaust memoir, Bau: Artist at War, has been newly republished by Blackstone Publishing with a foreword by Clila and Hadasa Bau. Its return in a new edition allows global readers to encounter Joseph’s own voice — his humor and eyewitness testimony — at the very moment the film is introducing the Bau story to broader audiences. This renewed visibility ensures that the words of the man behind the legacy continue to reach the world just as the museum dedicated to preserving it faces its greatest challenge.
How to Help
The building that houses the Joseph Bau Museum has been sold and is slated for demolition. As a first step to secure the museum’s future, the Bau family has launched an urgent global crowdfunding campaign to raise $200,000. The funds will support a museum relocation feasibility study and business plan with Gallagher & Associates, a world-leading museum planning and design firm, as well as other essential relocation expenses.
🔗 Donate: www.causematch.com/josephbaumuseum
🔗 For more information about Joseph and Rebecca Bau, the film, view the virtual tour, sign up for the newsletter, learn how to host the traveling exhibition, and more: www.linktr.ee/JosephBauHouse
Why This Matters Now
We live in a time when survivors are leaving the world and historical truth is being challenged within it. To lose a museum this personal, this joyful, this defiant — built by a man who fought fascism with ink, laughter, and imagination — would be to lose a compass we desperately need.
Joseph and Rebecca Bau did not endure the Holocaust only to have their legacy quietly dismantled by circumstance.
They survived to teach us that:
Love can outlast empires.
Humor can subvert tyranny.
Art can outlive hatred.
And the brightest resistance is to build, create, and love anyway.
Now it is our turn to prove that their survival was not in vain.
If you are reading this, you are not being asked to save a museum.
You are being called to safeguard the proof that light can overcome darkness.
Donate. Share. Stand with us.
Joseph and Rebecca Bau didn’t just leave us history. They showed us how to carry light forward.
Lee Tanenbaum is an Atlanta-based writer and volunteer communications advocate for the Joseph Bau Museum. She first traveled to Israel in March 2024, where she volunteered and conducted jewelry-making workshops with Israeli evacuees living in hotels, before beginning her ongoing work with the Bau family to support preservation efforts and global awareness of Joseph and Rebecca Bau’s extraordinary legacy.
