The Museum offers a wide range of tours and educational programs meeting the specific needs and interests of teachers and students in Jewish day schools and congregational schools. Our education staff is happy to work with you to arrange for speakers, prepare pre- and post-visit lesson plans, and develop special programs to make your visit to the Museum a meaningful experience.

Living Museum® is now online. We’ve taken our popular Living Museum classroom program and made it an interactive website and curriculum enabling students to create online museums of artifacts that represent their Jewish heritage.  Click here to visit our online Living Museum. 

Workshops for Teachers
Tours for Jewish Schools
Shoah Teaching Alternatives in Jewish Education
Coming of Age
Living Museum

Workshops for Teachers

Tours for Jewish Schools

Specially designed student workbooks are available for all of our tours. Ask about our pre- and post-visit activities.

Meeting Hate with Humanity explores the many ways that Jews affirmed their cultural and religious identities before World War II, and examines how individuals and communities in Europe responded to Nazi terror and the Holocaust. Students will consider the many different responses to the crisis, as Jews tried to preserve their dignity and humanity in the face of persecution, and discuss the challenges and changes that emerged in the post-Holocaust world. The Museum is fortunate to have Holocaust survivors available to meet with students to answer questions and continue the discussion of topics explored on the tour. (For middle and high school students)

Building a Bayit uses the diverse collection of the Museum's core exhibition to describe the many different components of Jewish communal life. Students will discover how expressions of individual, family, and communal identities helped to build the relationships relevant to Jewish life around the world, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. ( For middle school students.)

Israel and the Diaspora helps students uncover the roots of the complex relationship between Israel and the Diaspora, Bavel ve-Yerushalayim, throughout history. What does it mean for Jews to have more than one home? What impact has the Shoah had on our attitudes toward the creation of a Jewish homeland? What other options in addition to Israel presented themselves throughout history, and how were they received? (For middle and high school students.)

Daring to Resist:  Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust

A tour of the Museum’s special exhibition Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust will introduce students to artifacts that allow them to explore the range of Jewish responses in defiance and resistance during the Holocaust, including acts to maintain dignity, document the unimaginable, save lives, and resist with arms.  Click here for more information about the exhibition. (For middle and high school students)

Coming of Age During the Holocaust, Coming of Age Now

A tour for bar and bat mitzvah students that focuses on the artifacts and stories of young people who came of age during the Holocaust.  The tour engages students in a dialogue in the Museum galleries on the themes of Jewish identity, community, and responsibility.  There are 13 stops on the tour, symbolic of the bar mitzvah.  The tour may be combined with classroom study using the Coming of Age curriculum (see below for further info).

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Shoah Teaching Alternatives in Jewish Education (STAJE)
STAJE brings together some of the best Holocaust educators from the United States and Israel in an effort to raise the level of Shoah education in Jewish schools. STAJE programs include teacher training workshops, a three-day summer symposium, and new curricula designed for different ages.

The STAJE program led to the development of essential guidelines for teaching about the Shoah. While other guidelines for Holocaust education exist, these strategies are specific to Jewish schools. These Guiding Principles for Teaching the Shoah in Jewish Schools help teachers address questions of students in their particular schools and allow them to tackle difficult issues raised by the Shoah in an intellectually meaningful and age-appropriate fashion. We must recognize that how we teach ("pedagogy") and what we teach ("content") about the Shoah is just as important as why we teach about the Shoah. These guidelines support teachers in their vital efforts to help students recognize the extent of this tragedy, with its implications for Jewish identity today and for the very sense of what it means to be "human."

Click here for a PDF of the Guiding Principles.

This STAJE Institute and Coming of Age are made possible through the leadership support of The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc. - The Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education.

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Coming of Age

Coming of Age tour and curriculum
In preparing for a bar or bat mitzvah, a young person is preparing to become a fully recognized member of the Jewish community.  What does it mean to be a part of the Jewish community? What responsibilities are involved? These are important questions to consider while embarking on the journey towards coming of age.  The Museum is pleased to present a special tour and curriculum for bar and bat mitzvah students to discuss these questions. 

The Coming of Age tour presents artifacts that focus on the stories of young people who lived during the Holocaust, and begins a dialogue in the Museum galleries on the themes of Jewish identity, community, and responsibility.  There are 13 stops on the tour, symbolic of the bar mitzvah.

The Coming of Age curriculum provides the resources for in-depth Holocaust study in the classroom with bar and bat mitzvah students.  The curriculum includes a Teacher’s Guide, student workbooks presenting the stories of 13 young people who came of age during the Holocaust, and DVDs of testimony from these survivors, some in English and some in Hebrew with subtitles.  Through the curriculum, students are guided through reading and writing activities to reflect on the challenges these survivors faced in maintaining their Jewish identities, the responsibilities they undertook for their families, the sacrifices they made for others, and the lessons that survivors want to teach the next generation as a result of their experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust.  As a result of studying this curriculum, students grow in their understanding of the Holocaust, and of themselves.

If you are interested in the Coming of Age tour and/or curriculum, please contact Nili Allyn Isenberg at 646-437-4308 or nisenberg@mjhnyc.org.

The Coming of Age curriculum is a project of the Museum in collaboration with Yad LaYeled - The Ghetto Fighters’ Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum in Israel. A generous grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany: The Rabbi Israel Miller Fund for Shoah Research, Documentation and Education enabled the collaboration for the development of this material. 

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Living Museum®
The Living Museum provides Jewish school students with the tools they need to uncover and decipher their family heritage through the objects and heirlooms found in their own homes. Through this engaging project, students come to identify with their past, while learning about how it helped to shape them as individuals and as Jews. The program combines a Museum visit, classroom workshops, and independent intergenerational learning.

The program begins with a visit to the Museum, where museum educators work with students to develop the practice of learning through artifacts. A series of exercises examine the principles of display, providing context for, and labeling artifacts. Following the visit students begin their independent research, learning about their family histories and writing about important heirlooms, photographs, and other artifacts and primary documents from their own past.

The culminating event is the presentation of a mini-museum curated by students at their own school that highlights their Jewish heritage, providing an exciting opportunity to share student learning with the extended school community.

Living Museum Online

The online Living Museum teaches middle school students and their teachers to curate their own museums. The Living Museum helps middle school students form a personal connection to modern Jewish history by showing how their lives and their families fit into the modern Jewish experience. Click here to view the Living Museum.

Students begin the project by visiting a museum and learning how museums are organized.  They then interview their families and select an artifact that represents their family and their Jewish heritage.  The learning continues in the classroom as students write their own artifact labels and organize their artifacts into galleries. These artifacts and galleries come alive as student curate online and in-school exhibitions of their work. 

This exciting expansion of the Living Museum (described above) has been made possible through generous funding from The Covenant Foundation.  The online Living Museum enables students to share the results of their research with the world!  Click here to visit our online Living Museum.

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Edmond J. Safra Plaza • 36 Battery Place • Battery Park City • New York, NY 10280
General Museum Info call 1.646.437.4200 • Ticket Info call 1.646.437.4202
Museum Hours Sunday-Tuesday, Thursday: 10am to 5:45pm • Wednesday: 10am to 8pm • Friday: 10am to 5pm D.S.T., 10 am to 3pm E.S.T. • Eve of Jewish Holidays: 10am to 3pm

Copyright 2003, Museum of Jewish Heritage. All rights reserved.