Qualla: Jewish Museum Berlin

Jewish Museum Berlin: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Avi1111 dr. avishai teicher, CC BY-SA 4.0. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a businesswoman in 17th-century Hamburg. She raised fourteen children, ran her late husband's gemstone trade, paid her debts, prayed in Yiddish, and wrote a memoir in seven volumes that survives. She is one of the people whose life the Jewish Museum Berlin asks you to meet before it shows you what was lost. Daniel Libeskind's zigzag building on Lindenstraße — a metal lightning bolt of zinc cladding, opened in 2001 and now the largest Jewish museum in Europe — does not begin with the Holocaust. It begins with a thousand years of Jewish life in German lands. The point is to know who the people were before showing what was done to them.

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Image: Avi1111 dr. avishai teicher | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jewish Museum Berlin: Two Thousand Years in the Rhine

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GodeNehler, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jewish communities settled along the Rhine in the early Middle Ages. Speyer, Worms, and Mainz — the three cities Jewish tradition called "Shum" — became centres of Talmudic scholarship and Yiddish literature in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The new core exhibition, opened i...

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Image: GodeNehler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jewish Museum Berlin: Libeskind's Architecture as Memorial

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beek100, CC BY-SA 3.0. Daniel Libeskind won the design competition in 1989 with what jurors nicknamed Blitz — "Lightning." The building has no ground-floor entrance of its own. You descend from the baroque Kollegienhaus next door into three slanting underground corridors he called the Axes, representin...

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Image: Beek100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jewish Museum Berlin: The Voids

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Superchilum, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cutting straight through the entire zigzag building, from basement to roof, runs a series of empty vertical spaces Libeskind called the Voids. They are roughly 20 metres tall, sealed off, mostly unenterable, lined in raw concrete. Bridges cross some of them on the upper floors. T...

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Image: Superchilum | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jewish Museum Berlin: The First Museum, the Last Exhibition

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Christian Riemann, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original Jewish Museum in Berlin opened on 24 January 1933 — six days before Hitler became Chancellor. Karl Schwartz built it next to the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße to demonstrate that Jewish history was living history, with busts of Moses Mendelssohn and Abraham G...

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Image: Peter Christian Riemann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Jewish Museum Berlin: What the Building Asks

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. By December 2017 the museum had welcomed more than 11 million visitors. Across the street stands the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy, also designed by Libeskind, named for the museum's founding director — a German Jew who fled to Shanghai with his family in 1939, later served as Ji...

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Image: Gerd Eichmann | CC BY-SA 4.0