The Jewish Museum is a museum which explicitly thematises and integrates, for the first time in post-war Germany, the history of the Jews in Germany and the repercussions of the Holocaust.

The design of the Jewish Museum engenders a fundamental rethinking of architecture in relation to this program. The museum exhibits the social, political and cultural history of Jews in Berlin from the 4th Century to the present. The new extension is connected to the Baroque building via underground axial roads. The longest one leads to the Stair of Continuity and to the Museum itself; the second leads to the Garden of Exile and Emigration and the third axis leads to the dead end of the Holocaust Void.

The displacement of the spirit is made visible through the straight line of the Void which cuts the ensemble as a whole, connecting the museum exhibition spaces to each other via bridges. The Void is the impenetrable emptiness across which the absence of Berlin's Jewish citizens is made apparent to the visitor. In the first eight weeks of the opening more than 200,000 visitors attended.