Jewish lives, stories and creativity

The journey in one line

13 stops in Poland, Israel, Germany, United States, Austria, Czech Republic, Morocco, China, Australia, France and Bosnia & Herzegovina so far. The first rung is 4 of them, and the list keeps growing.

This journey exists because Jewish heritage is too often presented as a single subject, and that subject is death. These museums are about the other thousand years. POLIN begins with merchants arriving in Poland and spends most of its floor space before 1939. ANU in Tel Aviv is built around communities, languages and music rather than one national story. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco has no permanent collection at all, only commissions. Taken together they show a culture that argued with itself constantly and made a great deal while doing it.

A museum chooses where to start and where to stop, and those choices are an argument. Putting the Museum of Moroccan Judaism and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum on the same list as Berlin and New York changes what the word Jewish is taken to mean. Casablanca holds the only museum of Judaism in the Arab world. Shanghai remembers a city that asked no visa when almost every other door was closed. Melbourne took in more Holocaust survivors per head than anywhere outside Israel. None of those are footnotes.

Most of these keep ordinary museum hours, with two habits worth knowing. The Jewish institutions usually close on Saturdays and Jewish holidays rather than Mondays. Where they follow the local museum convention instead, the item says so. POLIN's core exhibition takes at least three hours and is worth a whole morning. The Jewish Museum in Prague is a circuit of six buildings on one ticket, not a single visit. Book timed tickets for Warsaw, Berlin and New York in high season.

Where it goes

The stops, in order

What a visit means here. A recorded visit means entering the museum. Where a museum is a circuit of several buildings, such as Prague, the circuit counts as one visit.

1. 1

   POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

   Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN

   Warsaw, Poland

   

   POLIN stands on the ground of the Warsaw ghetto and tells a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, not only its ending. The core exhibition walks from the first merchants through the shtetl, the printing houses and the arguments of the nineteenth century to the present day.

   What counts as a visit

   The core exhibition and the temporary galleries.

   Access

   Closed on Tuesdays. Timed tickets are sold online and the core exhibition takes several hours. Checked 16 September 2026.

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

2. 2

   ANU, Museum of the Jewish People

   אנו, מוזיאון העם היהודי

   Tel Aviv, Israel

   

   ANU is the largest Jewish museum in the world. It was rebuilt from Beit Hatfutsot and reopened in 2021 with a different argument: not a single story of one people in one place, but many communities, languages and ways of being Jewish, told through faces, music, food and synagogue models.

   What counts as a visit

   The permanent floors and the temporary exhibitions on the Tel Aviv University campus.

   Access

   Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, with shorter Friday hours. Checked 16 September 2026.

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

3. 3

   Jewish Museum Berlin

   Jüdisches Museum Berlin

   Berlin, Germany

   

   Daniel Libeskind's zinc building is part of the exhibit. Its voids, its slanting floors and the Garden of Exile argue about absence before a single object is read. The collection covers nearly two thousand years of Jewish life in German lands, including the long ordinary centuries.

   What counts as a visit

   The core exhibition, the Libeskind building's axes and voids, and the temporary galleries.

   Access

   Free entry to the core exhibition, with security screening at the door. Closed on some German public holidays. Checked 16 September 2026.

   A place of reflection

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

4. 4

   Museum of Jewish Heritage

   New York, United States

   

   A six sided building in Battery Park City, facing the harbour immigrants arrived through. It is a living memorial to the Holocaust, and it deliberately begins with Jewish life before 1933 and continues past 1945 rather than stopping at the camps.

   What counts as a visit

   The core exhibition, the temporary galleries and the Garden of Stones.

   Access

   Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, with shorter Friday hours. Checked 16 September 2026.

   A place of reflection

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

5. 5

   Jewish Museum Vienna

   Jüdisches Museum Wien

   Vienna, Austria

   

   Vienna's Jewish museum works across two houses: Dorotheergasse for the modern city that produced Freud, Mahler and Schnitzler, and Judenplatz above the excavated foundations of a medieval synagogue burned in 1421. Together they cover both ends of a very long story.

   What counts as a visit

   Both museum sites, Dorotheergasse and Museum Judenplatz, on one ticket.

   Access

   Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. One ticket covers both houses. Checked 16 September 2026.

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

6. 6

   Contemporary Jewish Museum

   San Francisco, United States

   

   The CJM holds no permanent collection. It commissions instead, which makes it a museum about what Jewish culture is making now rather than what it made. Daniel Libeskind wrapped a blue steel form shaped from the Hebrew letters chet and yud around an old power substation.

   What counts as a visit

   The exhibition galleries in the Yerba Buena building.

   Access

   Open on limited days each week and the programme is entirely temporary shows. Check what is on before travelling. Checked 16 September 2026.

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

7. 7

   Skirball Cultural Center

   Los Angeles, United States

   

   The Skirball sets Jewish immigrant experience beside the wider American one and makes the comparison the point. Its core exhibition runs from the Mediterranean to Ellis Island to Los Angeles, and its programme of music and family exhibitions is open to the whole city.

   What counts as a visit

   The core exhibition, the temporary galleries and Noah's Ark.

   Access

   Closed on Mondays. Noah's Ark needs a separate timed ticket. Checked 16 September 2026.

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

8. 8

   Jewish Museum in Prague

   Židovské muzeum v Praze

   Prague, Czech Republic

   

   The Prague museum is not one building but a quarter: the Maisel, Klausen, Spanish and Pinkas synagogues, the Ceremonial Hall and the Old Jewish Cemetery, where twelve thousand stones lean against each other. Its collection survived because the Nazis gathered confiscated objects here.

   What counts as a visit

   The museum's synagogues, the Ceremonial Hall and the Old Jewish Cemetery on one circuit ticket.

   Access

   Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. The circuit ticket covers several buildings and hours vary by season. Checked 16 September 2026.

   A place of reflection

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

9. 9

   Museum of Moroccan Judaism

   Musée du Judaïsme Marocain

   Casablanca, Morocco

   

   Opened in 1997 in a former Jewish orphanage, this is the only museum of Judaism in the Arab world. Morocco held the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world, and the museum keeps its synagogue interiors, its embroidery and its jewellery in the country where they were made.

   What counts as a visit

   The exhibition rooms, including the reconstructed synagogue interiors.

   Access

   Closed on Saturdays. Hours are short and the museum sits in a residential quarter of Casablanca. Checked 16 September 2026.

   Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

10. 10

    Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum

    上海犹太难民纪念馆

    Shanghai, China

    

    Shanghai asked no visa, so around twenty thousand Jews fleeing Europe reached it when almost every other door was shut. They lived in the Hongkou district, later a designated area under Japanese control. The museum is built around the Ohel Moshe synagogue and names the people who came.

    What counts as a visit

    The Ohel Moshe synagogue building and the museum galleries and courtyard around it.

    Access

    Open daily with published hours. The wall of names and the synagogue are part of the same circuit. Checked 16 September 2026.

    A place of reflection

    Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

11. 11

    Jewish Museum of Australia

    Melbourne, Australia

    

    Melbourne took in more Holocaust survivors per head than any city outside Israel, and the Jewish Museum of Australia tells that arrival alongside the convict era Jews who came much earlier. It sits in St Kilda, the neighbourhood the post-war community made its own.

    What counts as a visit

    The museum galleries in St Kilda.

    Access

    Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays. Check current opening days, which are limited. Checked 16 September 2026.

    Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

12. 12

    Museum of Jewish Art and History

    Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme

    Paris, France

    

    The mahJ occupies the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais, a seventeenth century mansion whose Jewish tenants were deported in 1942. The collection runs from medieval gravestones through the Dreyfus archive to Chagall and Modigliani, treating Jewish art as part of French art.

    What counts as a visit

    The permanent collection and the temporary exhibitions in the mansion.

    Access

    Closed on Mondays and on Jewish holidays. Security screening at the courtyard gate. Checked 16 September 2026.

    Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

13. 13

    Museum of the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina

    Muzej Jevreja Bosne i Hercegovine

    Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina

    

    Sarajevo's Old Synagogue, Il Kal Grandi, was built around 1581 by Sephardi families who reached Bosnia after 1492. It is now the museum of Bosnian Jewry. Ladino was spoken in this city into living memory, and the community's wartime rescue work is part of the display.

    What counts as a visit

    The former synagogue building and its galleries on two floors.

    Access

    A department of the Museum of Sarajevo, with its own opening days. Checked 16 September 2026.

    A place of reflection

    Check access · last checked September 16, 2026

Respect and access

These are museums, so ordinary museum behaviour applies. Two things are specific. Several hold Holocaust sections inside an otherwise celebratory building, and the tone changes when you walk into them. Follow the building's lead. Choosing this journey says nothing about who you are. Nobody here needs to know your religion or your ancestry, and the app does not ask.

A place of reflection

This is a memorial or a site of atrocity. Visitors are asked to be quiet, to follow the custodian's guidance on photography, and to treat it as somewhere people grieve.

Opening times, prices, permits and eligibility change. Nothing on this page is a statement about today. Follow the Check access link on a place before you plan around it.

Sources

• polin.plhttps://www.polin.pl/en · checked September 16, 2026
• anumuseum.org.ilhttps://www.anumuseum.org.il/ · checked September 16, 2026
• jmberlin.dehttps://www.jmberlin.de/en · checked September 16, 2026
• mjhnyc.orghttps://mjhnyc.org/ · checked September 16, 2026
• jmw.athttps://www.jmw.at/en · checked September 16, 2026
• thecjm.orghttps://www.thecjm.org/ · checked September 16, 2026
• skirball.orghttps://www.skirball.org/ · checked September 16, 2026
• jewishmuseum.czhttps://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/ · checked September 16, 2026
• jewishmuseumcasa.comhttps://www.jewishmuseumcasa.com/ · checked September 16, 2026
• shhkjrm.comhttp://www.shhkjrm.com/ · checked September 16, 2026
• jewishmuseum.com.auhttps://www.jewishmuseum.com.au/ · checked September 16, 2026
• mahj.orghttps://www.mahj.org/en · checked September 16, 2026
• muzejsarajeva.bahttps://muzejsarajeva.ba/muzej-jevreja/ · checked September 16, 2026

TravelDay selected and grouped these places. Naming a custodian, a government agency or UNESCO as a source is not a claim that any of them endorsed this journey.