Family Collections

The family collections include more than 1,800 documentary legacies of German-Jewish families, and the number is constantly growing. They are donated to the museum by families across the world. Often, the papers and mementos were carefully protected through years of persecution and emigration, and they are deeply meaningful for the family’s own story. Every document, every object, and every photograph testifies to a particular historical moment ‒ but it also embodies very personal memories.

The fact that families donate their personal treasures to the museum after many years affirms their confidence in our day-to-day work. But it also brings great responsibility: an obligation to systematize the collections, conserve them safely, and communicate knowledge about them to the widest possible audience. 

For the JMB, these holdings are essential. They illuminate individual destinies, whole family biographies, and historical situations in context, as well as enabling us to ask ever-changing questions about their present-day significance.

The family collections offer many different points of contact for the museum’s educational work, for example in guided tours, workshops, school visits by the project JMB on.tour, or the digital classroom JMB di.kla. They also play an important part in analog and digital exhibition and publication projects. Many collection items appear in the core exhibition in a variety of thematic and historical contexts. The core exhibition’s Family Album, an interactive wall featuring more than 500 objects, invites visitors to embark on a very personal voyage of discovery through the family collections.

The Digitization Process

To establish the JMB even more strongly in the digital world, a specially designed digitization project has been opening up the family collections since 2024. Its aim is to improve the visibility, accessibility, and long-term preservation of the personal archives. Thanks to the project, we have been able to share more than 250 years of Jewish families’ lived experience worldwide and make the documents available for research and educational use. Donors can now explore the collections with their family members – often dispersed across the world – without having to travel to Berlin. 

To make this access possible, the museum holdings have to be analyzed, cataloged, restored, digitized, tagged, and checked for copyright and privacy rights before being put online. The digitization process brings together a dozen museum employees from the areas of archives, photography, photo documentation, exhibition documentation, conservation, and legal advice. In early 2026, more than 50,000 digital objects had been created. Over 20,000 of them are already accessible online, and that number rises every day.