British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry Sponsor Funded Therapy Center in West Bank Settlement Under UK Sanctions

Igor Tulchinsky stood beside Efrat's mayor in November 2025 to unveil a "therapy yurt" at the settlement's Mondlak Center, calling it, according to a post on the Efrat Development Foundation's Instagram page, Israel's "inner Iron Dome."

Tulchinsky, a Belarus-born billionaire and founder of the investment firm WorldQuant, is also the sponsor behind the British Museum's Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, a deal reported to be worth roughly £5m ($6.75m) that opened to the public this week.

The therapy yurt sits inside a "community resilience centre" serving Gush Etzion, a bloc of settlements roughly 12km southeast of Jerusalem. Efrat, the bloc's largest settlement, is built on land seized from four Palestinian villages and is home to about 12,000 settlers. Tulchinsky was named the primary sponsor of the facility. According to the foundation's Instagram account, he dedicated it to "Israel's brave warriors and their families."

"Israel's inner Iron Dome" — Igor Tulchinsky, describing the therapy yurt at its unveiling, per the Efrat Development Foundation's Instagram page.

The Mondlak Center operates under the Efrat Development Foundation, a nonprofit that says it is "dedicated to advancing Efrat's social, cultural, and physical development." The foundation's website lists a top donor tier, "Vision Partner," priced above $50,000 and offering donors a role in "strategic planning." The same foundation advertises support for settler families in Givat HaEitam, the contested hilltop development known as E-2 that Palestinian rights advocates say would sever Bethlehem from the rest of the southern West Bank.

The full extent of Tulchinsky's financial contribution is not established. Middle East Eye reported that his firm, WorldQuant, did not respond to requests for comment. The Efrat Development Foundation confirmed to MEE that Tulchinsky was a donor but said his money came through a separate organization it declined to identify. A photograph of Tulchinsky at the yurt's opening remains posted on the foundation's fundraising page. The British Museum has not responded to MEE's questions about the sponsorship.

The timing places the settlement visit close to a British policy shift. Two days after the Efrat visit was reported, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy's successor Ed Miliband told Parliament that settlers were carrying out "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians and that the occupation was unlawful, announcing sanctions against those who "finance or facilitate illegal settlements."

Efrat's mayor, Dovi Shefler, who appeared alongside Tulchinsky at the unveiling, has described the settlement's expansion in explicitly political terms. "We are physically blocking the connection between Bethlehem and Hebron," he said in an April interview, adding that construction was being used to cut off what he called a "terrorist state" from taking shape.

Efrat leans heavily toward Israel's far right: in the 2022 election, 48 percent of its votes went to Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, the parties led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, both of whom the UK sanctioned in June 2025 for what it called repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian communities. Smotrich appeared in a video with Shefler in May praising the mayor's settlement-expansion work and urging construction inside Gaza.

MEE also noted that Declassified UK reported in April that an Israeli organization was recorded offering to help British citizens relocate to Efrat, a settlement roughly half of whose residents are native English speakers.