The sukkah
An opening-roofed room, among few left in Germany.
Florian Hurlbrink — CC BY-SA 4.0 · José Luiz — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wolfgang Sauber — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wolfgang Sauber — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because the two adjoining cities fell under different authorities: Nuremberg was a free imperial city that expelled its Jews in 1499 and barred their return for centuries, while Fürth lay under several competing jurisdictions that permitted Jewish settlement in return for fees. The result was a large Jewish community forming kilometres from a city that excluded it — and that contradictory adjacency is the museum's implicit subject.
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The Jewish Museum of Franconia sits in Fürth, the city adjoining Nuremberg, and its location is a deliberate choice: Fürth was called the Franconian Jerusalem — a flourishing Jewish centre with its religious schools and Hebrew printing presses, at a time when neighbouring Nuremberg barred Jews from living there following their expulsion in 1499. The museum occupies an eighteenth-century Jewish house that survives with its detail: it holds a ritual bath, a mikveh, still standing in the cellar, and a sukkah — a ceremonial room with an opening roof used at the festival of Tabernacles — among the few of their kind remaining in Germany. These original elements are what distinguish it from newer Jewish museums. The exhibition covers the rural Jewish life of Franconia across centuries — not the catastrophe alone but daily life, trade and custom — and then persecution, genocide and the aftermath. Access from Nuremberg is easy: a direct metro to Fürth in about twenty minutes.
An opening-roofed room, among few left in Germany.
Centuries of rural life, not only the catastrophe.
Konigstrasse 89, 90762 Furth