Today, 10 members of the Harvard community are leaving the University after an accumulated 150 years of service to the Semitic Museum.

The staff members lost their jobs after an advisory committee recommended a restructuring of the museum to curb the seven-year cumulative deficit of $1 million.

Yesterday, the museum began a new search for an assistant director and an assistant curator. "There is nothing that precludes them from applying for these jobs," said the museum's director Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel Lawrence E. Stager '65.

But as the staff members exit the museum, they leave Harvard on a bitter note.

Since the committee report was released on November 2, the staffers and many of their supporters have been at the center of a heated debate about the reasons for the cuts and the future of the Semitic Museum.

The staff members have strongly criticized the report's provisions to reduce some of the museum's public programs and to relocate the ethnographic and photographic collections to other museums.

Staffers have said that despite the report's indications to continue public exhibitions, the suggested reductions are paramount to closing the museum.

"Even if they manage to keep it open, it is certainly not going to have the exhibitions it had in the past," said Curator for Exhibits Nitza Rosovsky. "The doors will be open, but I don't know where they will haveexhibitions if there is no staff."

Although the report says that 90 percent of themuseum's deficit was incurred by the photo archiveand the public exhibits program, staffers saidthat during the last year, the museum was close toraising the much-needed funds.

Staffers and other museum supporters said thefundraising restrictions implemented during lastyear's committee review thwarted efforts to elicitthe money.

"We were forbidden to raise funds so that wecould close for lack of funds," Curator andExecutive Director Carney Gavin said last month."

Critics say that possible donors who hadexpressed interest in supporting the museum werediscouraged from coming through with their pledgeswhile the future of the museum was yet to bedetermined.

Joseph Peeples, a museum contributor who wasreached in Bogota, Colombia, yesterday said he wasplanning to give the royalties from his upcomingbook to the museum.

"But I certainly wasn't going to do that if the[public] facet of the museum is going to change,"Peeples said.

"Many people were planning to contribute,"Peeples said. "But who would give money into asituation which was going to be changed to theextent that the intent of those contributionswould be altered?"

And critics have attributed much of the deficitto what they characterize as Stager's lack ofinterest in the museum since his arrival in 1986.