Jewish Museum Berlin — museum
Marek Śliwecki · CC BY-SA 4.0

Jewish Museum Berlin

Jüdisches Museum Berlin

  • 2 min read
  • 52.502° N 13.395° E

Interesting facts

  • Even before any exhibits were installed, the empty Libeskind building drew more than 350,000 visitors who came to see the architecture alone.
  • Berlin's first Jewish museum opened on 24 January 1933, just six days before the Nazis came to power, and survived less than six years.
  • The project was nearly lost in 1991, when the city briefly cancelled it to divert money into Berlin's bid for the Olympic Games.
  • The voids that cut through the Libeskind building rise about 20 metres and are left as bare, unheated concrete spaces.
  • The Libeskind extension cost about 65 million US dollars, and construction work began in November 1992.
  • Between its opening in 2001 and the end of 2017, the museum welcomed more than 11 million visitors.
  • The museum's archive holds over 1,500 family bequests and more than 1,200 memoirs written by German-speaking Jews.
  • A branch of the Leo Baeck Institute in the museum gives access to roughly a million documents on German-Jewish history.
  • Since 2002 the museum has given an annual Prize for Understanding and Tolerance; Chancellor Angela Merkel received it in 2011.
  • A children's museum, a project costing about 3.4 million euros, opened at the site in June 2021.

Why it is worth it

From above, the Jewish Museum Berlin looks like a lightning bolt broken into zigzags; from the street it is a long, sharp-edged volume clad in zinc and slashed by narrow, irregular windows. Daniel Libeskind's building, which won a competition against 189 other entries in 1989 and opened in September 2001, is one of the most influential works of architecture of its time, a museum in which the building itself is the first exhibit.

There is no front door. Visitors enter through the baroque Kollegienhaus of 1735, built for the Prussian supreme court and later home to the Berlin Museum, and descend underground into the new building. In the basement three corridors cross at odd angles. Libeskind called them axes: one of continuity in German history, one of emigration and one of the Holocaust. The axis of exile leads outdoors into the Garden of Exile, a grid of 49 tall concrete pillars set at disorienting angles, with oleaster growing from the tops; 48 are filled with Berlin earth and one with soil from Jerusalem. The Holocaust axis ends in the Holocaust Tower, a 24-metre empty concrete shaft, unheated and lit only through a slit in the roof. Through the whole building run the voids, bare concrete spaces that stand for what can never be shown. In one of them, the Memory Void, the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman laid more than 10,000 cut steel faces, titled Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves).

The museum's core exhibition, Jewish Life in Germany: Past and Present, traces the story from the Middle Ages to today. In 2007 the courtyard of the Kollegienhaus was covered by a glass roof, and a few years later the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy opened opposite in a converted 1960s flower market hall. The museum carries the memory of an earlier one: Berlin's first Jewish museum opened on Oranienburger Straße in January 1933 and was closed by the Gestapo in November 1938.

Getting there

The museum stands at Lindenstraße 9–14 in Kreuzberg, close to the centre of Berlin. The nearest U-Bahn stations are Hallesches Tor (lines U1 and U6) and Kochstraße (U6). The nearest airport is Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER), about 17 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Berlin 6The Most Beautiful Places in Germany 87The Most Remarkable Museums in Germany 5The Most Beautiful Buildings in Germany 18The Most Remarkable Museums 93The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The Jewish Museum Berlin was opened in 2001 and is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. On 3,500 square metres of floor space, the museum presents the history of the Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day, with new focuses and new scenography. It consists of three buildings, two of which are new additions specifically built for the museum by architect Daniel Libeskind. German-Jewish history is documented in the collections, the library and the archive, and is reflected in the museum's program of events.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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