MiQua

MiQua. LVR-Jewish Museum in the Archaeological Quarter Cologne. Together with the Roman Praetorium, the medieval Jewish Quarter, and the Goldsmith’s Quarter, the MiQua presents highly significant archaeological evidence from the history of Cologne and the Rhineland. As of 2024, visitors will be able to explore an underground archaeological route of more than 600 meters in length on an area of more than 6,000 square meters. With its eleventh-century synagogue and the ritual bath (mikvah), as well as community and residential buildings, the Jewish quarter is unique in its size and state of preservation. Impressive finds from the excavation illustrate everyday life and coexistence in the quarter. This presentation is supplemented by a large number of written sources from the Middle Ages, which illustrate the phases of peaceful coexistence, but also bear witness to times of expulsion, persecution, and murder. The upper floor of the new museum building on Rathausplatz will house a permanent exhibition focusing on Cologne’s Jewish history and culture from 1424 – the year when Cologne’s Jews were forced to leave the city and their quarter – to the present day. During the summer semester of 2021, MiQua and Jewish Places carried out a cooperative seminar with Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Cologne. More than 40 students from both universities participated by researching Jewish places in Berlin and Cologne and compiling entries, which they added to the Jewish Places map. Among others, this project resulted in the entries about Trude Joan Schiff, the Oppenheim family and the Leonhard Tietz department store. Also, at the traveling exhibition “People, Images, Places: 1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany, on display in North Rhine-Westphalia from March to December 2021, MiQua presented the Jewish Places website at a media station.