Jewish Museum Berlin in Berlin

The Jewish Museum Berlin, founded on Oranienburger Straße in 1933, is a 3,000-square-metre museum which covers 2,000 years German Jewish history. However the museum’s exhibition was closed by the Nazis in 1938. Plans for the museum’s revival were presented in 1971, and the establishment of Association for a Jewish Museum followed in 1975. A Jewish department of the Berlin Museum opened after the institution first displayed an exhibition on Berlin Jewish history in 1978. The site was granted status as an independent institution in 1999. The impressive building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was completed in 1999 and opened as an exhibition venue in 2001. The museum is directed by Berlin-born Professor W. Michael Blumenthal, a former US Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter.

The building itself has been conceived as a work of art, blurring lines between sculpture and architecture. A view of the building from above reveals a large zig-zag line, resulting in the building's nickname – blitz (German for 'thunderbolt'). The main structure is clad in zinc plating and the windows are lines that cross the walls in a random fashion, which were created from connecting different sites from a Berlin map. The building offers no access from the street, as the entrance is located in the adjacent structure, a museum of German history, via a staircase and tunnel embedded in a concrete tower, which rises through the floors of the German museum.

The design of the museum symbolises the interconnection between German and Jewish history. The museum’s staircase ends in an underground site, comprised of three hallways, or axes: the Axis of Death, which leads to a concrete tower called the Holocaust Tower; the Axis of Continuity, which stretches through the remaining two hallways, representing the presence of Jews in Germany, in spite of the Holocaust and the Axis of Exile, which leads to an square courtyard composed of columns and tilted in one of the corners, called the Garden of Exil. This Axis leads to a staircase leading to the main exhibition building. The entrance to the museum has been deliberately made difficult, so that visitors can get a feeling of challenge and hardship, distinctive of Jewish history.

The main building hides a straight line, marked by hollow concrete towers painted in black, with tiny windows from which visitors can see other visitors in the opposite windows. One of the towers, Memory Void, is dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. Menashe Kadishman’s 'Shalechet' installation, comprising 10,000 iron faces, allows visitors to walk on the work, which creates an industrial-type noise. The Jewish Museum offers contemporary art installations, temporary exhibitions, cabinet displays and various interactive multimedia shows at the Rafael Roth Learning Center, complementing the wide range of themes.