Jewish Museum Berlin

The Jewish Museum Berlin (Jüdisches Museum Berlin) is Europe's largest Jewish museum, having established in 2001. The museum portrays the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the current day on 3,500 square metres (38,000 square feet) of floor space, with new themes and scenography. It is made up of three buildings, two of which were designed expressly for the museum by architect Daniel Libeskind. German-Jewish history is chronicled in the museum's collections, library, and archive, and it is represented in the museum's event schedule.

From its inception in 2001 to December 2017, the museum had over eleven million visitors, making it one of Germany's most visited museums.

Opposite the building ensemble, the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin was built – also after a design by Libeskind – in 2011/2012 in the former flower market hall. The archives, library, museum education department, a lecture hall and the Diaspora Garden can all be found in the academy

The first Jewish Museum in Berlin was established on January 24, 1933, under the supervision of Karl Schwartz, six days before the Nazis took power. The museum was established close to the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße and housed displays of modern Jewish art as well as Jewish history. Schwartz envisioned the museum as a way to revitalise Jewish creativity and demonstrate that Jewish history was alive and well. The museum's art collection was also seen as a contribution to German art history, and one of the museum's final shows was a retrospective of the German impressionist, Ernst Oppler, in 1937. To represent the museum's emphasis on living history, the entry hall included busts of famous German figures.

Jews such as Moses Mendelssohn and Abraham Geiger, as well as works by modern Jewish artists such as Arnold Zadikow and Lesser Ury, are represented.

The museum was closed down by the Gestapo on November 10, 1938, during the 'November Pogroms,' also known as Kristallnacht, and the museum's inventory was confiscated. A "Society for a Jewish Museum" was created in 1976, and three years later, the Berlin Museum, which recorded the city's history, established a Jewish Department, although ideas about creating a new museum dedicated to Jewish history in Berlin were already underway.

The Berlin government launched an anonymous competition for the design of the new museum in 1988, with a jury led by Josef Paul Kleihues. Daniel Libeskind's design was picked from among 189 submissions a year later. A year later, the committee picked Daniel Libeskind's design from among 189 applications for what was then envisaged as a "Jewish Department" for the Berlin Museum. While other competitors presented cold, neutral settings, Libeskind pitched a daring, zigzag design that earned him the nickname "Blitz" ("Lightning").

Berlin's administration temporarily stopped the project in 1991 in order to fund their candidacy for the Summer Olympics in 2000. Six months later, the decision was changed, and in November 1992, building on the $65 million addition to the Berlin Museum started. The empty museum was finished in 1999 and drew over 350,000 visitors before it was filled and inaugurated on September 9, 2001.

The Jewish Museum Berlin is located in what was West Berlin before the fall of the Wall. Essentially, it consists of two buildings – a baroque old building, the “Kollegienhaus” (that formerly housed the Berlin Museum) and a new, deconstructivist-style building by Libeskind. The two buildings have no visible connection above ground. The Libeskind building, consisting of about 15,000 m2 (160,000 sq ft), is a twisted zig-zag and is accessible only via an underground passage from the old building.

For Libeskind,

The new design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down, was based on three conceptions that formed the museum’s foundation: first, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by the Jewish citizens of Berlin, second, the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin. Third, that only through the acknowledgement and incorporation of this erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin, can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.

A line of "Voids", empty spaces about 66 feet (20 m) tall, slices linearly through the entire building. Such voids represent "That which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: Humanity reduced to ashes."

In the basement, visitors first encounter three intersecting, slanting corridors named the "Axes." Here a similarity to Libeskind's first building – the Felix Nussbaum Haus – is apparent, which is also divided into three areas with different meanings. In Berlin, the three axes symbolize three paths of Jewish life in Germany – continuity in German history, emigration from Germany, and the Holocaust.

The Garden of Exile

The second axis connects the Museum proper to the Garden of Exile, whose foundation is tilted. The Garden's oleaster grows out of reach, atop 49 tall pillars (48 filled with Berlin's earth, one with earth from Jerusalem). The third axis leads from the Museum to the Holocaust Tower, a 79-foot (24 m) tall empty silo. The bare concrete Tower is neither heated nor cooled, and its only light comes from a small slit in its roof. The Jewish Museum Berlin was Libeskind's first major international success.

In recent years, Libeskind has designed two structural extensions: a covering made of glass and steel for the "Kollegienhaus" courtyard (2007), and the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy of the Jewish Museum in a rectangular, 250 m2 (2,700 sq ft) 1960s flower market hall on the opposite side of the street (2012).

The diaspora garden at the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy

In 2016, a jury appointed by the Jewish Museum Berlin awarded the first prize in an architectural competition for a new €3.44 million children's museum for 3 to 12 year-olds to Olson Kundig Architects; the second prize was awarded to the Berlin firm Staab Architekten and third prize to Michael Wallraff of Vienna. The planned children's museum will be housed in the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy and is scheduled to open in 2021.

Collections and archives

The Jewish Museum's collections date back to the 1970s, when the Society for a Jewish Museum formed. The first acquisitions were Jewish ceremonial artworks belonging to the Münster Cantor Zvi Sofer. Soon, fine art, photography and family memorabilia were acquired. The collection is now divided into four areas: ceremonial objects and applied arts, fine arts, photography, and lastly, everyday culture. The museum archive safeguards over 1,500 family bequests, in particular from the eras of the Empire, the First World War, and Nazism. The library comprises 100 000 media on Jewish life in Germany and abroad.

Since September 2001, there has been a branch of the archive of the New York Leo Baeck Institute at the Jewish Museum. The LBI has its principal office in New York and holds the most comprehensive collection of materials on the history of Jews in Germany, Austria, and other German-speaking areas in Central Europe of the last 300 years – including about one million documents such as local authority records, personal documents, correspondence, a photo archive as well as numerous testimonies from religious, social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic life. The collection of more than 1,200 memoirs of German-speaking Jews (also and especially from the post-Nazi era) is unique. 

In its permanent exhibition, ANOHA, the Children’s World of the Jewish Museum Berlin, presents the story of Noah’s Ark from the Torah to young visitors of daycare and elementary school age. It expands the offerings of the Jewish Museum Berlin. Admission is free, and opening hours and other visitor information can be found on the ANOHA website. Location ANOHA is located in the rear of the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy opposite the Jewish Museum Berlin. The entrance is on the north side of the academy building, which occupies the site of the former wholesale flower market in Kreuzberg. The children’s museum is recognizable by a four-meter-tall sloth on the building’s facade, made from bicycle fenders and other recycled objects. Construction and exhibition The Children’s World was built between 2018 and 2020 to a design by Olson Kundig Architecture and Exhibit Design in Seattle, Washington, USA. The Jewish Museum Berlin committed itself to a sustainable architectural approach when implementing the project. Instead of constructing a new building, it housed ANOHA in a 2,695-square-meter space in the existing complex, home to the former flower market. The sustainable climate approach uses an energy and natural ventilation system specially developed for the exhibition. In the hall and the ark structure, large ceiling fans and windows with smoke and heat exhaust ventilation facilitate air exchange and eliminate the need for an energy-intensive, full air conditioning system. At the center of the exhibition is a 585-square-meter ark made of untreated renewable native spruce. The ship-like construction is round, in keeping with Mesopotamian sources. It is twenty-eight meters in diameter and rises to a height of seven meters under the vaulted ceiling of the former flower market hall. The 150 animal sculptures in the ark introduce a variety of themes and offer opportunities for discussion. They were designed by artists using recycled materials, chance finds, and everyday objects. The life-size donkey, for example, was assembled from seventy-one different parts and objects. The kubix company was responsible for constructing the animals.