Young Perspectives – Your Tour Through the Museum

Over the course of around one hour, the Young Perspectives guide takes users to ten stops in the museum, elements that are varied in both topic and format but consistently narrated from a young person’s standpoint. The tour begins with the large-scale video installation Drummerrsss and the museum’s distinctive architecture. The subsequent stops look at Jewish religion and tradition and how these underpin the everyday life of Jewish teenagers today. In the historical sections, visitors meet young Jewish women including Henriette Herz and Anne Frank. The experience of exclusion and persecution under the Nazis is brought to life by the story of Paul Kuttner, who reached England on one of the Kindertransport trains while his sister went into hiding in Berlin and his mother was deported and murdered. The next stop introduces the challenges faced by the “quota refugees” – Jews who came to Germany from the former Soviet Union after 1989. At the end of the tour, visitors can listen to the voices of present-day Jews in Germany in all their diversity.

Each stop can be approached through four different options. “What’s it all about?” conveys key content in the form of text, audio, or video. “It’s your turn!” invites users to join in, featuring quizzes, games, and creative tasks. The option “Very personal!” presents interviews, historical testimonies, and the voices of young Jewish Berliners, while “What do you think?” encourages reflection and discussion. In this way, visitors do not simply learn facts about objects, individuals, and artworks, but are able to work out their own perspectives and enter into conversation with each other.

Hetty Berg, Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, explains: “The JMB’s Young Perspectives – Your Tour Through the Museum gives young people a space to discover the museum in their very own way. The tour connects knowledge with personal stories and makes it possible to encounter Jewish life in the past and present from a young person’s point of view. It’s important to us that young people can find parallels with their own everyday world and experience the museum as a place that speaks to them directly.”

One of the team's adolescents described his experiences at the workshop as follows: “We went through the exhibition, discussed which topics the app should cover and how these key points could be explained to young people. We also talked about our Jewish identities, and I read out the parashah, the weekly Torah portion, from my bar mitzvah to show what it sounds like, because our voices were recorded and are now the voices of the app. My aim was that after listening to Young Perspectives, young people would no longer think of their history lessons when they hear about Jews, but of us – young Berlin Jews.”

Young Perspectives – Your Tour Through the Museum was developed with the collaboration of young people and actively integrates their views. This enabled the JMB to create a free service that addresses younger visitors directly, offering an attractive alternative to classic guided tours or workshops. Thanks to the free Wi-Fi available at the museum, the content is simple to use with visitors’ own smartphone and earphones. Young Perspectives is part of the JMB App, which can be downloaded for free from all app stores in advance of the visit. For the latest information on the new digital service in the JMB App, visit the website: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/app-young-perspectives.

The JMB cordially thanks the foundations Friede Springer Stiftung and Michael Otto Stiftung for making this digital content possible. In times of growing antisemitism, the JMB is more dependent than ever on committed partners and supporters in its quest to reach different target groups. Young Perspectives is an important element of the JMB’s educational work and digital transformation, and the generous support of the Friede Springer Stiftung and the Michael Otto Stiftung has allowed us to finally make it a reality, filling an important gap.