Jewish Museum, Cape Town

A visit to the Jewish Museum should be on everyone’s “must” list, as it is an exciting and successful mixture of the old and the new.

The entrance to the museum is in the Old Synagogue which was founded in 1863, making it one of the oldest in South Africa. You cross a bridge from the synagogue and into the ultra-modern high-tech museum and it is just like stepping forward in time.

The museum was founded in the nineteen fifties, but has been extensively renovated and the new model was opened by Nelson Mandela in 1999. Various videos are shown throughout the day, the most important one being a documentary entitled “Nelson Mandela – A Righteous Man”.

The interactive displays take you through the history of South Africa and the history of Jewish life, with a heavy emphasis and the moral and political side of being a Jew living under the apartheid reign.

There is a wonderful scale model of a “shtetl”, or small village mainly populated by Jews. There were many of these in Eastern Europe before the Second World War and the one you will see in the museum is based on a village in Lithuania, where most of the Jews in South Africa came from originally.

In the Discovery Centre you will find family trees with information about over 15000 families who can trace their origins back to Eastern Europe before settling in South Africa between 1880 and 1930.