Museum of Jewish Heritage Launches Collections Online, Providing Free Access to More Than 10,000 Digitized Artifacts

Photo Credit: Andrew Filippone Jr. | Museum of Jewish Heritage

The new portal offers virtual access to historic objects, photographs, documents, and artworks ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27

The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust announces the launch of its Collections Online, a new digital portal that provides free, ongoing public access to the Museum’s permanent collection.

The launch of the Museum’s digital portal follows several years of intensive and ongoing work to digitize and catalog the Museum’s permanent collection, an effort generously supported by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (or, the Claims Conference). It features more than 10,000 objects in records and images—including artifacts of all kinds, photographs, and ephemera—offering a dynamic portrait of Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust. In the months and years to come, the database will continue to expand access to the permanent collection, which currently contains more than 45,000 objects in total.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage’s collecting began decades before the Museum opened its doors and remains active today. In 1990, the Museum merged with the groundbreaking Center for Holocaust Studies, Documentation and Research at Brooklyn College, the first organization in the United States dedicated to the study of the Holocaust, founded by historian Dr. Yaffa Eliach. Dr. Eliach was among the first to prioritize the collection of primary source documentation about the Holocaust. Over the course of 26 years, the CHS collected oral histories, documents, photographs, and artifacts that changed how Holocaust victims were perceived. The Center, like the Museum today, emphasized individuals’ experiences and personal stories that combat common notions of impersonal victimhood.

In addition to the searchable database, the Collections Online makes available two special curations—the first is a spotlight on remarkable recent acquisitions in the last four years, which offer explorations of immigration, displacement, trauma, and renewal. These include, among others, a set of hand-made doll’s clothing brought by child Margot Kohn on her Kindertransport from Germany to England, and a wooden prosthetic arm belonging to Romanian survivor Matthew Burger, who lost his arm while on a search for his sisters, post-liberation, when the truck he was riding in collided with a US convoy passing too closely.

The second is a room-by-room, object-focused walkthrough of the Museum’s Core exhibition, The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do.

Visitors to the site can also access “Featured Collections” such as Judaica, where heirloom and ritual objects showcase the richness of Jewish tradition; Legal Documents detailing stories of escape, survival, and military service through personal paperwork; and Nazi Propaganda, showing the mechanisms and manipulations of the authoritarian regime. Together, these excerpts of daily life and material add texture to a complex and often abridged, or abstracted, history.

“Launching the Collections Online is an important step for the Museum’s future as we approach our 30th anniversary next year. The permanent collection houses one-of-a-kind objects and artifacts that reflect our unique position as New York’s Holocaust Museum, and the engaged community that has continually enriched our storytelling over the years. Getting to show off the breadth and depth of Jewish stories in our Collection is game-changing for scholars, researchers, students, and visitors alike – and brings our public history work squarely into the 21st century,” says Sara Softness, the Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Collections Online launched ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed annually on January 27, and is the most recent of several digital initiatives the Museum has taken to further its reach and mission of education and remembrance.

In 2025, the Museum launched Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialogue as both an interactive video installation and website, leveraging non-generative AI to facilitate conversation with real Holocaust survivors, along with “The Danish Rescue: Compassion in Action,” which transformed the Museum’s groundbreaking children’s exhibition into a richly layered, online experience for studying Holocaust history in classrooms around the country.

“Having access to our museum’s collection online is invaluable. It enhances the quality of remote professional development we can offer educators with high-resolution images and rich historical context for thousands of artifacts,” says Jennifer Goldsmith, Vice President of Education at the Museum. “In addition, after students visit our permanent exhibition, The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, they can now return to their classrooms and access the artifacts they saw on site at the Museum for continued discussion, research, reflection, and writing, allowing them to deepen and extend their learning.”

Explore the portal at: https://mjhnyc.emuseum.com/collections

About The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is New York’s contribution to the global responsibility to Never Forget. Opened in 1997, the Museum is committed to the crucial mission of educating diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.

The Museum plays a leading role in Holocaust education in New York City and the Tri-State area, serving many thousands of school children each year, with initiatives such as its Holocaust Educator School Partnership Program, professional development opportunities, its Speakers Bureau which enables conversations with survivors, and the creation of tools and resources such as the newly released Antisemitism FAQ Educator Resource to support educators in teaching about both historical and contemporary antisemitism.

The Museum’s current offerings include Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark, an exhibition about the extraordinary rescue of Denmark’s Jewish population in 1943, a story of mutual aid and communal upstanding in difficult times for visitors aged 9 and up; and The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, a major exhibition offering a timely and expansive presentation of Holocaust history, on view in the main galleries.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage maintains the Peter & Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Resource Center, a collection of almost 40,000 artifacts, photographs, documentary films, and survivor testimonies, and contains classrooms, a 375-seat theater (Edmond J. Safra Hall), special exhibition galleries, and a memorial art installation, Garden of Stones, designed by internationally acclaimed sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. The Museum also hosts LOX at Café Bergson, an OU-certified café serving Eastern European specialties.

Each year, the Museum presents over 100 public programs, connecting our community in person and virtually through lectures, book talks, concerts, and more. The museum provides free admission to Holocaust Survivors, active members of the military, first responders, New York City educators with current ID cards, and New York City public school K-12 students.

The Museum receives general operating support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit mjhnyc.org.