The Danish Jewish Museum

As a visitor, you step into a room that is an unfathomable and expressive landscape. The light wood paneling on the walls alludes to the Nordic surroundings, while the sloping floors evoke memories of sea voyages. It’s a space that immediately stirs emotions in you as a visitor. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, has chosen the Hebrew word ‘Mitzvah’ as the entire concept for the museum’s layout. Mitzvah means a good deed, and by this, he refers to the fact that the majority of Danish Jews survived World War II by fleeing to Sweden. The museum’s architecture is a bright narrative compared to the darkness of the Holocaust in the rest of Europe during World War II.

The museum houses two exhibitions. The special exhibition “Flight and Persecution in the 20th Century” and the exhibition “The Gateway to Denmark,” which tells the story of the establishment of Danish Jewish life in 18th-century Denmark. In ‘Flight and Persecution in the 20th Century,’ guests can see carefully selected objects, which are staged by the illustrator Kristian Bay Kirks’ illustrations. The exhibition goes all the way up to the present day because antisemitism did not disappear with the end of the war but still exists and is growing in various countries, including Denmark. “The Gateway to Denmark” is the first part of a larger narrative about 400 years of Danish Jewish history. The exhibition was created in collaboration with the exhibition studio at Moesgaard Museum.