Israel’s Diaspora museum, Beth Hatefutsoth, is launching a $50 million campaign to renovate its structure and grounds, expand and overhaul its exhibits, and digitize its archives.

The effort was kicked off last night at the St. Regis, where the legendary Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky addressed a sold-out gala dinner celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Soviet Jewish struggle for freedom.

Last night’s gala honored Stephen M. Greenberg, who is past president of American Friends of Beth Hatefutsoth. In a visit yesterday to The New York Sun, Mr. Sharansky was enthusiastic about changing Beth Hatefutsoth from a museum about the past to a more forward-looking institution that would be a way to knit together the Jewish people.

Launched in 1978 by the founder of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldman, the Tel-Aviv-based museum hit a low point around 2000 due to budget cuts, and deferred maintenance. It even considered closing.

But when Ariel Sharon subsequently visited the museum, he saw its exhibits as a place where visitors could grasp what has held the Jewish people together throughout the millennia.

Mr. Sharansky was instrumental in obtaining Israeli government support of $10 million in new funds to the museum over five years. Beth Hatefutsoth now joins the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem and the Israel Museum, which emphasizes art and archeology, as Israel’s only national museum. The museum has begun a new campaign in North America and elsewhere to raise an additional $40 million. Mr. Sharansky said he hoped the museum would “strengthen the base of our mutual identity.”

Beth Hatefutsoth’s new director general, Hasia Israeli, told the Sun the museum’s varied archival collections ranges from 48 different melodies for the Friday evening prayer “Lecha Dodi” to home movie footage of Poland taken in the 1930s. A new exhibition, “Jews of Struggle – the Jewish National Movement in the USSR, 1967-1989,” will open in late October, with highlights such as Golda Meir’s visit to Moscow in 1948, the refusniks’ imprisonment and the 1989 fall of communism that opened waves of immigration to Israel.

Earlier this week, the Sun sat down with the chair of the museum’s international board, Leonid Nevzlin. He finds the term “museum” too limiting in describing Beth Hatefutsoth, which covers the world Jewish experience over the past 2,500 years. Mr. Nevzlin, who made a fortune during Russia’s privatization in the 1990s, envisions the institution as a center for information about Jewish history and its people, where viewers can access databases of genealogical records and other archival materials. “The people of the Book,” he said, need to have good information for writing and research.

He said the museum will grow in activity, with schools, researchers, Hillel, Birthright Israel, and other visitors, connecting to the “common heart of our nation.” Toward that goal, the Nadav Fund, which he co-founded, launched the International School for Jewish Peoplehood Studies at the museum, offering courses to teachers on Jewish culture and tradition around the world.

Mr. Nevzlin, now an Israeli citizen, grew up in secular home in the former Soviet Union. He has seen threats to Judaism in the Diaspora. He said that before perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, anti-Semitism was a “formal, official policy” of the country. While this is no longer the case at the government level, he said today anti-Semitism was even worse at the people level.