Category I
Archaeological Sites
Walking the physical ground of Jewish antiquity. Chapter · The Land of Israel and Chapter · Continuous Presence document the broader continuity these sites anchor.
Virtual Tour · Jerusalem
City of David · Virtual Tour
The City of David archaeological park covers the oldest settled part of Jerusalem, first inhabited in the Bronze Age. Its full virtual tour walks the excavations and the key biblical-era sites.
Museum Wing · Jerusalem
Shrine of the Book · Israel Museum
The Israel Museum’s permanent installation housing the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a complete Isaiah scroll from c. 125 BCE, and the Aleppo Codex (c. 930 CE). The digital portal offers high-resolution facsimiles of the complete Isaiah scroll and other manuscripts, readable verse by verse in any browser.
3D Model · Jerusalem
The Second Temple Model · Israel Museum
A 1:50 open-air reconstruction of Jerusalem as it stood in 66 CE, on the eve of the Great Revolt. It recreates the Temple, the Upper City, and the streets around them, before the Roman destruction of 70 CE. The Israel Museum’s model shows the ancient city whole. Pairs naturally with the City of David tour and the Shrine of the Book.
Site · Judean Desert
Masada National Park
Herod’s mountaintop fortress, the site of the Jewish revolt’s final stand against Rome in 73 or 74 CE. Extensive archaeological remains include a synagogue and ritual baths used by the rebels during the First Jewish-Roman War.
Catacombs · Galilee
Beit She'arim Necropolis
The catacombs where Rabbi Judah the Prince, compiler of the Mishnah (c. 200 CE), was buried, along with several centuries of Jewish leaders. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015. Its inscriptions, in Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Palmyrene, record Jewish life in the land after the failed revolts against Rome.
Site · Tel Kedesh
Tel Kedesh: A Site and a Project
A large mound in the Upper Galilee, near today’s border with Lebanon. Excavators found a Persian- and Hellenistic-era administrative building with an archive of more than 2,000 clay seals. It was abandoned around 144/143 BCE, a date linked to the battle at Kedesh described in 1 Maccabees 11. A classroom window into how archaeologists work.
Excavation · Portugal
A Villa's Surprising Residents
Archaeology magazine on a Roman villa in Portugal where excavators found a stone slab with a Hebrew inscription naming “Yehiel,” dated to the fourth century CE or earlier. It may be among the oldest Jewish remains on the Iberian Peninsula.
Category II
Roman Imperial Sources
The monuments and annals that recorded Jerusalem's fall. Chapter · The First and Second Temples documents the broader institutional history.
Monument · Rome
The Arch of Titus
Erected on the Via Sacra in 81 CE to commemorate Titus's destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The interior relief shows Roman soldiers carrying the Temple menorah, the showbread table, and silver trumpets in triumph. Both a Roman victory monument and primary archaeological evidence of the Temple's destruction. Tradition long held that observant Jews did not pass beneath it until the United Nations voted for a Jewish state in 1947, or, by some accounts, until Israel’s founding in 1948.
Annals · c. 110 CE
Tacitus · Histories, Book V
The Roman historian's hostile account of the Jews and of Titus's siege of Jerusalem, the source quoted in Unit 3. The full Latin text and English translation are hosted by the University of Chicago's LacusCurtius. One of the earliest surviving Roman texts hostile to Jews, and a primary source on the fall of Jerusalem.
History · c. 75 CE
Josephus · The Jewish War
Eyewitness account by a Jewish-Roman historian who served as both Jewish commander and Roman captive during the Jewish-Roman War. The most extensive primary source on the events leading to the destruction of the Second Temple.
Coin · Roman Propaganda
Judaea Capta Coinage
Roman commemorative coins struck under Vespasian and Titus (71–81 CE). The best-known type shows a mourning Jewish woman beneath a palm tree, with the Latin legend IVDAEA CAPTA, “Judaea captured.” Roman state propaganda celebrating the conquest of Judaea. Held in numismatic collections including the British Museum and the American Numismatic Society.
Category III
Historic Jewish Quarters
The ghettos, neighborhoods, and synagogues still walkable today. Chapter · The Ghetto System documents the institutional architecture, and Chapter · American Jewry documents the broader American arc the Lower East Side anchors.
Quarter · Venice
The Venetian Ghetto
The ghetto that gave the institution its name, established March 29, 1516, on a foundry island in the Cannaregio sestiere of Venice. Still walkable today, with five surviving synagogues and the Museo Ebraico di Venezia. The unusually tall residential buildings remain evidence of the spatial constraint.
Quarter · Rome
The Roman Ghetto
Created by Pope Paul IV's decree Cum nimis absurdum on July 14, 1555. Its residents were freed when Italian unification reached Rome in 1870, and the ghetto walls came down in 1888, 333 years after the decree. The portico from which the October 1943 deportations were staged still stands. The Great Synagogue of Rome, completed in 1904, anchors the quarter today. The Jewish Museum of Rome's permanent collection includes an immersive AR/VR reconstruction of the historic ghetto as it stood before its 19th-century demolition.
Quarter · Prague
Josefov · Prague Jewish Quarter
One of the most intact historic Jewish quarters in Europe. It includes the Old-New Synagogue (built c. 1270, still in use) and the medieval Old Jewish Cemetery. The Pinkas Synagogue is inscribed with the names of about 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia. Most sites are run by the Jewish Museum in Prague, and the Old-New Synagogue by the Prague Jewish Community.
Quarter · New York · 1881–1924
The Lower East Side
The largest Jewish neighborhood in the world by 1910. It was the main destination of the more than two million Jews who came to America between 1881 and 1924, from the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. The Tenement Museum at 97 and 103 Orchard Street preserves specific family stories: the Levines from the Russian Empire, the Confinos from Kastoria, in today’s Greece, and the Epsteins, Holocaust survivors who moved in during the 1950s. Each is anchored in a real apartment and a primary-source archive.
Category IV
Historic Synagogues
Continuity in stone, from the ancient Galilee to medieval Europe to the New World. Chapter · The Synagogue documents the broader institutional history these buildings compose.
Virtual Tour · 360° · Worldwide
Synagogues360 · Inside Synagogues Worldwide
Interactive 360° tours inside synagogues around the world, from village prayer rooms to grand city buildings, searchable by place. From ANU, the Museum of the Jewish People. Free, no login.
Synagogue · Prague · c. 1270
Old-New Synagogue (Altneuschul)
Europe's oldest continuously active synagogue, built in the Gothic style around 1270 in Prague's Josefov quarter. Survived seven hundred years of expulsions, fires, and the Nazi occupation. Legend long held that the Golem of Prague rests in its attic. Active Sabbath services to this day.
Synagogue · Newport, RI · 1763
Touro Synagogue
The oldest standing synagogue in the United States, dedicated December 2, 1763. Its congregation received George Washington’s 1790 letter on religious liberty, which promised a government that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The letter is still widely cited in discussions of American religious freedom.
Synagogue · New York · 1887
Eldridge Street Synagogue
The first great house of worship built by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in America, dedicated 1887 on the Lower East Side. A National Historic Landmark, now home to the Museum at Eldridge Street.
Synagogue · Toledo · 1357
Synagogue of El Tránsito
Built in 1357 under Samuel ha-Levi, treasurer to King Pedro of Castile. The El Tránsito synagogue is one of the best-preserved monuments of medieval Sephardi Spain. Mudejar architecture, Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions side by side. Now the Sephardic Museum of Toledo (Museo Sefardí), Spain's national museum of Sephardic heritage.
Synagogue · Jerusalem · 1864 / 2010
The Hurva Synagogue
In the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. Originally built 1864, destroyed by the Jordanian Arab Legion in 1948, reconstructed in 2010 on the original plan. Both the destruction and the reconstruction are documented architectural evidence of modern Jerusalem history.
Synagogue · Córdoba · 1315
Córdoba Synagogue
One of the few medieval synagogues still standing in Spain, and the only one in Andalusia, built in 1315 in Mudejar style. After the 1492 expulsion it became a hospital, then a guild chapel and a school. Rediscovered in 1884, it was declared a National Monument in 1885.
Category V
Museums to Explore Online
Major collections you can explore from the classroom, each with online exhibitions and digital archives built for teaching. For more virtual visits, the Museum page gathers twenty online exhibitions you can walk through, tour, and read.
Museum · Jerusalem
Tower of David Museum · Jerusalem
The museum in the ancient citadel by the Jaffa Gate. Ten galleries of archaeological finds and interactive displays tell Jerusalem’s layered history across some 3,000 years. Its website offers online exhibits on the geography and chronology of Jerusalem.
Museum · Tel Aviv
ANU · Museum of the Jewish People
Formerly known as Beit Hatfutsot, on Tel Aviv University’s campus. The museum describes itself as the largest Jewish museum in the world. Digital portal offers online exhibitions and a family-history database. Built explicitly for global Jewish diversity, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and beyond.
Virtual Tour · Philadelphia
The Weitzman · American Jewish History
An online walkthrough of the core exhibition at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, floor by floor from 1654 to today: colonial arrival, mass immigration, the Holocaust’s American dimension, and postwar life. Free and projectable. Grades 6 and up.
Source · Online · Fustat, c. 1152–1153
The Cairo Geniza online
The storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo held around 400,000 fragments, the ordinary paper trail of medieval Jewish lives. At the end of the 1800s scholars carried them to libraries in Cambridge, Oxford, New York, and elsewhere. Two of those libraries put the papers within reach of a classroom. Penn’s OPenn site posts its Halper fragments as full-size public-domain scans, among them Halper 472, the account notes of a Jewish India trader written in Judeo-Arabic and Arabic at Fustat, in Cairo, around 1152 and 1153. Princeton’s Geniza Project is a searchable database of the documents, with transcriptions in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, and Arabic and the people and places named in them. Cambridge’s Taylor-Schechter unit is on the Films page.
Archive · Online · Vilna before 1939
YIVO Vilna Online Collections
In 1925 Yiddish scholars founded YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and made Vilna its home. Much of its material came from volunteer collectors called zamlers, ordinary men and women who gathered documents in their own towns. The Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project digitizes and virtually reunites YIVO’s prewar library and archive, divided since the war between New York and Vilnius, with parts of the Strashun Library of Vilna beside them. In May 2017 some 170,000 pages of unknown documents turned up in Vilnius and widened the project. Browsable online, with exhibitions, featured artifacts, a section on cultural resistance during the Holocaust, and notes on classroom use.
Virtual Tour · Athens
Jewish Museum of Greece
Greece held two Jewish worlds side by side: the Romaniote Jews, present since the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and the Sephardic Jews who settled under Ottoman rule after the expulsion from Spain and made Salonika a Ladino-speaking city. From March to August 1943 the Germans deported more than 45,000 of Salonika’s Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were gassed on arrival. In late July 1944 they deported about 1,800 more from Rhodes and Kos, and fewer than 200 of them survived. The museum’s 3D virtual tour walks its galleries with three-dimensional close-ups of selected objects, and its digital exhibitions include “Synagonistis: Greek Jews in the National Resistance” and the Jewish communities of Ioannina, Corfu, and Thessaloniki.
Museum · Or Yehuda, Israel · Est. 1973
Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center
The museum of Iraq’s Jews, founded in 1973 in Or Yehuda, a town that grew out of one of the biggest immigrant transit camps for the Iraqi Jews who arrived in 1950 and 1951. Its departments cover the way of life, customs, and art of the Jews of Iraq. Online it keeps a photo archive, a film archive, family trees, and records of the Zionist underground, with a 360-degree walk through the museum (Hebrew interface). The community’s story, from Babylon to the 1941 Farhud and the departure of roughly 120,000 to 130,000, mostly to Israel, is told in The Jews of Iraq Chapter.
Online Exhibition · New York · Est. 1893
The House on Henry Street
In 1893 Lillian Wald, a Jewish nurse from Rochester, began nursing immigrant families in the tenements of the Lower East Side, for free or for what they could afford. Her rounds grew into the Henry Street Settlement and into a profession she named, public health nursing. By 1913 the Settlement ran seven buildings on Henry Street, 3,000 members in classes and clubs, and 92 nurses making 200,000 home visits a year. It still works in the neighborhood, and its history exhibition can be walked in person or online, with a timeline and a tour of the house. Pairs with the Lower East Side card above and the Tenement Museum.
Category VI
Holocaust Memorials & Museums
Documentation, witness, and memorial. Chapter · The Memory Architecture documents the broader institutional framework these sites compose. The camps themselves are the subject of Chapter · The Camp System. The transit camps and the governments that helped fill the trains are told in its section Across Europe, and the ravine at Babyn Yar in Chapter · The Einsatzgruppen.
Memorial · Jerusalem · Est. 1953
Yad Vashem
The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, established by Knesset law on August 19, 1953, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. Its archive holds some 227.6 million pages of documentation and about 4.9 million names in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. It has recognized more than 28,000 Righteous Among the Nations from 51 countries. Its Holocaust History Museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in 2005. Extensive online collections, virtual tours, and free educational materials available worldwide.
Museum · Washington, D.C. · Opened 1993
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States' national institution for Holocaust documentation. Federally chartered October 7, 1980 under Public Law 96-388 with Elie Wiesel as founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Dedicated on the National Mall April 22, 1993. Architect James Ingo Freed (Pei Cobb Freed & Partners). Some 50 million visitors since its dedication. Extensive online collections of survivor testimony, photographs, propaganda, and the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Memorial · Berlin · Dedicated May 10, 2005
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Holocaust-Mahnmal)
The German national memorial in central Berlin, one block south of the Brandenburg Gate. Architect Peter Eisenman designed its 2,711 concrete stelae, across approximately 19,000 square meters. The Bundestag vote of June 25, 1999 approved the Eisenman design 314-209. The underground Information Center, with an exhibition designed by Dagmar von Wilcken, documents individual victim stories below the field of stelae above. Admission to the field of stelae and to the Information Center is free.
Memorial · Berlin · Villa of January 20, 1942
House of the Wannsee Conference
The lakeside villa where fifteen senior officials of the SS, the Nazi Party, and the Reich ministries met on January 20, 1942 to coordinate the deportation and murder of Europe’s Jews. Adolf Eichmann kept the minutes, and one copy of the thirty made survived the war. The memorial posts them online in the German original and an English translation, a document students can read line by line. Its online exhibitions include “Gurs 1940,” on the October 1940 deportation of Jews from southwest Germany to the camp at Gurs. “Silent Testimonies 1939” presents more than 1,000 photographs and 380 pages of German soldiers’ diaries and letters from the attack on Poland.
Memorial · Decentralized · 1995–present
Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Stones”)
By the project’s count, 116,000 brass-topped stones set in front of the last chosen homes of victims of Nazi persecution, in 31 European countries. The project calls it the largest decentralized memorial in the world. The artist Gunter Demnig published the concept in 1993 and laid the first stones in Cologne in 1995. Each stone carries the name, year of birth, deportation date, and place and date of death of a single victim. Most are set into ordinary city sidewalks.
Site · Oświęcim, Poland · Est. 1947
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum
The preserved site of the largest of the Nazi killing centers, where approximately 1.1 million people were murdered, about one million of them Jews. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. The Soviet liberation occurred January 27, 1945, the date observed internationally as International Holocaust Remembrance Day under UN GA Resolution 60/7 of November 1, 2005. About 1.83 million people visited in 2024. Educational programs in many languages, for different grade bands and audiences.
Site · Lublin, Poland · Est. 1944
Majdanek State Museum
The first major Nazi camp liberated by Allied forces (Soviet forces, July 1944), with its gas chambers preserved. The crematorium, set on fire by the SS as they left in July 1944, was partly reconstructed. Nearly 80,000 people were murdered there or died of starvation, disease, and abuse between 1941 and 1944, most of them Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians. The Camp System and Liberation Chapters both cover it.
Site · Treblinka, Poland · Memorial 1964
Treblinka Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom
The site of the killing center where, by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s estimate, about 925,000 Jews were murdered, among them most of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. The SS tore the camp down in 1943 and planted the ground over to look like a farm. The memorial, designed by Adam Haupt, Franciszek Duszeńko, and Franciszek Strynkiewicz and unveiled in 1964, is a field of about 17,000 stones. On 225 of them are the names of the towns from which Jews were deported here.
Site · Bełżec, Poland · Memorial 2004
Bełżec Museum
The first Operation Reinhard killing center, where at least 434,508 people were murdered in nine months of 1942. The SS destroyed the camp itself. The memorial, opened in 2004, reconstructs the record through landscape design and documentation.
Site · Sobibór, Poland
Sobibór Museum
At least 167,000 people were murdered at this killing center, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. It ended in the prisoner revolt of October 14, 1943. The SS razed the camp and planted trees over it. Archaeologists have recovered much of the site since the 2000s, and the gas chamber foundations were located in 2014.
Site · Chełmno nad Nerem, Poland
Chełmno Museum (Muzeum byłego niemieckiego Obozu Zagłady Kulmhof w Chełmnie nad Nerem)
The first dedicated killing center, where at least 152,000 Jews, most of them from the Łódź Ghetto and the region around it, and about 4,300 Roma were murdered in gas vans. A two-part memorial museum: the manor site at Chełmno, where the transports arrived, and the forest killing site at Rzuchów.
Museum · Kraków · Plac Bohaterów Getta
Eagle Pharmacy (Apteka pod Orłem)
The pharmacy of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the only non-Jewish Pole allowed to live inside the Kraków ghetto, who kept it open for as long as the ghetto stood. He and his three assistants passed information and smuggled food between the ghetto and the city, and the shop became a meeting place for the ghetto’s intellectuals, scientists, and artists. Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1983. The pharmacy is a branch of the Museum of Kraków today, with a permanent exhibition in its own rooms on the ghetto’s main square.
Site · Dachau, Germany · Memorial 1965
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
The first camp under SS control, opened March 22, 1933, and the model for the system that grew from it. At least 41,500 prisoners died or were murdered there. A substantial museum and educational center.
Site · Weimar / Buchenwald, Germany
Buchenwald Memorial
One of the largest German concentration-camp memorials, on the hill above Weimar. The site has a substantial postwar history of its own as a place of Soviet internment. Between 1937 and 1945 the SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system, some 11,000 of them Jews.
Site · Terezín, Czech Republic
Terezín Memorial
The preserved site of Theresienstadt, the transit camp and “model ghetto” the Nazis staged for the Red Cross in June 1944. About 34,000 prisoners died there, and about 88,000 more were deported to ghettos, camps, and killing centers in the East. About 3,500 of them survived. The Small Fortress served the Gestapo as a prison, and the Magdeburg Barracks housed the ghetto’s cultural and administrative life. Its collections hold works of art made by prisoners. The 4,387 drawings by the ghetto’s children are held by the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Museum · New York City · Opened 1997
Museum of Jewish Heritage
Battery Park, Manhattan. New York's living memorial to the Holocaust, opened 1997. Its exhibitions present Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Site · Amsterdam
Anne Frank House
The Prinsengracht canal house where Anne Frank wrote her diary in hiding from July 1942 to August 1944. Operates an extensive online virtual tour of the Secret Annex, alongside educational materials.
Memorial · Drenthe, Netherlands · Transit camp
Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre
The principal transit camp for the deportation of the Dutch Jewish community, told in The Camp System. Roughly 107,000 of the Netherlands’ 140,000 Jews were deported, most of them through Westerbork. Anne Frank and her family were deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944. Their hiding place, the Anne Frank House, is listed above. The museum stands three kilometers from the camp ground, where the embankments, the commandant’s house, and the monuments remain. Most programs are in Dutch.
Memorial · Paris and Drancy · Est. 1956, reopened 2005
Mémorial de la Shoah
France’s Holocaust memorial and documentation center, free to enter, with a virtual tour of its galleries and an online portal (in French) for searching names and documents. Its Wall of Names lists 75,568 Jews deported from France, 11,400 of them children. Its memory trail, offered for the July anniversary, walks the sites of the July 1942 roundup, when the arrested families were held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Its second museum stands at Drancy, the principal French transit camp, with its own virtual visit. The deportations from France are told in the Across Europe section of The Camp System.
Memorial · Mechelen, Belgium · Transit camp
Kazerne Dossin
The principal Belgian transit camp, in the Mechelen Kazerne, a former army barracks. By the memorial’s count, 25,490 Jews and 353 Roma were deported from here on 28 trains between 1942 and 1944, primarily to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and few of them survived. The museum tells the Holocaust in Belgium through the people on those trains, and its research center keeps an online archive and a reading room.
Memorial · Sereď, Slovakia
Sereď Holocaust Museum
About 16,000 Jews passed through the labor and concentration camp at Sereď, most of them murdered, in the deportations from Slovakia told in the Across Europe section of The Camp System. The museum, a branch of the Slovak National Museum, stands on the camp site itself, with a cattle wagon used for the Auschwitz transports among its exhibits and an educational center for seminars and courses.
Memorial · Jasenovac, Croatia · Monument 1966
Jasenovac Memorial Site
The largest of the camps run by Croatia’s Ustaša regime, a German ally. Its Jewish, Serb, and Roma victims are counted in the Across Europe section of The Camp System. Bogdan Bogdanović’s concrete Flower, unveiled on July 4, 1966, rises over the field where the camp stood. The memorial’s online list of individual victims, 83,145 names as of 2013, 20,101 of them children under fourteen, can be searched by name.
Museum · Budapest · Opened 2004
Holocaust Memorial Center
Hungary’s national Holocaust museum, on Páva Street. Its permanent exhibition, “From Deprivation of Rights to Genocide,” follows the Hungarian state’s treatment of its Jewish citizens from 1938 to the deportations of 1944, told in The Camp System. The Center keeps a searchable Memorial Wall of Victims and a database of rescuers online. The Dohány Street Synagogue, listed below, is in the same city.
Memorial · Kyiv · September 29–30, 1941
Babyn Yar
The ravine at the edge of Kyiv where SS and police units shot at least 33,771 Jews on September 29 and 30, 1941, according to the killers’ own report. The massacre is told in The Einsatzgruppen. For thirty-five years the Soviet state put up no memorial there, and the monument that finally went up in 1976 did not say that Jews were among the victims. Ukraine’s National Historical and Memorial Reserve keeps the grounds today, with a “Living Memory” exhibition center. The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, a foundation set up in 2016, maintains a names database and memorial installations on the site, among them a symbolic synagogue.
Category VII
Aktion T-4 Memorial Sites
The killing centers of the Nazi “euthanasia” program, January 1940 to August 1941. The program developed the gas-chamber method and trained personnel later sent to Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. That continuity is the central argument of Henry Friedlander’s The Origins of Nazi Genocide (1995). These preserved sites are memorial institutions today. Chapter · Aktion T-4 documents the broader program.
Memorial · Hesse, Germany
Gedenkstätte Hadamar (Hadamar Memorial)
The preserved T-4 killing center at Hadamar near Limburg. Almost 15,000 people were murdered at Hadamar between 1941 and 1945. Of these, 10,072 were gassed in 1941 under T-4, by the program’s own count, and of those killed in the later “wild euthanasia” of 1942–45, more than 4,400 are known by name. The gas chamber is preserved, with a history museum on site.
Memorial · Upper Austria · Near Linz
Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim (Hartheim Castle Memorial)
The preserved castle near Linz, Austria, that housed one of the six T-4 killing centers. Nearly 30,000 people were murdered there between 1940 and 1944: at least 18,269 patients under T-4 and thousands of concentration-camp prisoners under Operation 14f13. The program’s own tally, the “Hartheim Statistics” found here, counts at least 70,273 people killed across its six centers. The Renaissance castle has been preserved as a memorial since 2003.
Memorial · Brandenburg, Germany
Gedenkstätte Brandenburg an der Havel
The site of the first T-4 killing center. The gas-chamber method was worked out here in January 1940 under Christian Wirth and Viktor Brack, and killings ran from February to October 1940. The program recorded 9,772 people killed at Brandenburg. The institutional precursor of the Operation Reinhard killing centers.
Memorial · Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Gedenkstätte Grafeneck
The T-4 killing center at Grafeneck, in a former castle. The memorial counts 10,654 people murdered there in 1940 (9,839 by T-4’s own count).
Category VIII
Documentary Films
Long-form filmed evidence and witness.
Film · 1985 · 9 hr 26 min
Shoah · Claude Lanzmann
The 1985 documentary built from the testimony of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators, filmed on location, much of it in Poland, Germany, and Israel. It uses no archival footage. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum holds more than 220 hours of Lanzmann’s outtakes, most of them free to view online.
Series · 1978 · NBC
Holocaust (NBC Miniseries)
The 1978 NBC miniseries, with Meryl Streep and James Woods. Historians credit its 1979 West German broadcast with changing how many Germans engaged with the Holocaust. The Peabody Awards credit it with bringing the word “holocaust” into common use.
Archive · 60,000+ testimonies
USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive
Founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994. More than 60,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses, recorded in 45 languages across 69 countries. Access through partner libraries and access sites worldwide. Its Contemporary Antisemitism Collection includes testimony from survivors and witnesses of the October 7, 2023 attack.
Resource · Echoes & Reflections
Antisemitism & Video Toolbox
Free Holocaust-education curriculum for grades 6–12 from a partnership of ADL, USC Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem. Includes a dedicated unit on antisemitism and a video toolbox for the classroom.
A curated map. Browse the Sources directory →
In person
Worth the trip: visit in person
Some places in Jewish history have no online version, and others are best understood in person. To find sites closer to home, wherever that is, the directories at the end map Jewish heritage country by country, across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Links go to official visitor information. Many of these institutions also put their collections online. Browse the Museum directory of collections.
In Israel
- The Western Wall (Kotel) ↗ · Jerusalem
- The City of David ↗ · Jerusalem
- Masada ↗ · Judean Desert
- Qumran ↗ · Dead Sea, home of the Scrolls
- Caesarea ↗ · Mediterranean coast
- Tel Megiddo ↗ · Jezreel Valley
- Herodium ↗ · near Bethlehem
- Beit She’arim Necropolis ↗ · Lower Galilee
- The Israel Museum ↗ · Jerusalem
- Yad Vashem ↗ · Jerusalem
- ANU – Museum of the Jewish People ↗ · Tel Aviv
- Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center ↗ · Or Yehuda
- The Tower of David Museum ↗ · Jerusalem
Around the world
- The Venice Ghetto & Jewish Museum ↗ · Venice, Italy
- The Roman Ghetto & Jewish Museum ↗ · Rome, Italy
- MEIS · National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah ↗ · Ferrara, Italy
- The Portuguese Synagogue & Jewish Quarter ↗ · Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Anne Frank House ↗ · Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Bevis Marks Synagogue ↗ · London, United Kingdom
- The Jewish Museum & Josefov ↗ · Prague, Czech Republic
- Dohány Street Synagogue ↗ · Budapest, Hungary
- The Sephardic Museum & El Tránsito ↗ · Toledo, Spain
- Museum of Moroccan Judaism ↗ · Casablanca, Morocco · site in French
- Jewish Museum Berlin ↗ · Berlin, Germany
- The SchUM Sites: Speyer, Worms & Mainz ↗ · Germany · UNESCO
- POLIN Museum ↗ · Warsaw, Poland
- Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History & Paneriai Memorial ↗ · Vilnius, Lithuania
- Touro Synagogue ↗ · Newport, United States
- Eldridge Street Synagogue ↗ · New York, United States
- The Tenement Museum ↗ · New York, United States
- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum ↗ · Washington, United States
Directories by country
- Jewish Heritage Europe ↗ · heritage sites across Europe, country by country, from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe
- Diarna ↗ · Jewish sites of the Middle East and North Africa, mapped country by country
- The Jewish Museums Project ↗ · a worldwide directory of Jewish and Holocaust museums
- National Register of Historic Places ↗ · the official U.S. list of historic places. Search historic synagogues and Jewish landmarks state by state, from the National Park Service